The newly completed Paul L. Richards Physics Innovation Laboratory. The space will soon hold tools for computer-aided design, circuitry stations, and more.
A new experience awaits Berkeley Physics and Astronomy undergraduate students this fall with the opening of the Paul L. Richards Physics Innovation Lab (PIL). The new facility will offer students up-to-date tools for automated processing and computer-aided design, 3D printers and laser cutters, and soldering and circuitry stations.
The lab is partly funded by Berkeley’s Physics Innovators Initiative (Pi2). The idea is to give students hands-on experience with the types of equipment and projects they are likely to encounter in post-baccalaureate studies.
The new facility is named in honor of Emeritus Professor Paul Richards, a pioneer of infrared and millimeter wave physics. The Richards family is supporting the PIL to honor his belief that prototyping in the lab, making needed equipment, is an important bridge to learning.
“It's somewhere that students can go and work safely and not have to have lengthy training,” says Student Machine Shop Manager, Jesse Lopez. Additional lab equipment, he says, will include basic hand tools, voltmeters, oscilloscopes and other diagnostic equipment for electronics, and an optics table with lasers.
“We'll start simple. We'll start basic,” Lopez says. “And then we'll let the students kind of show us what they need.”
The PIL is not for any precision or industrial-type machining work, says PIL Student Manager Vivian Frisk.
“The Physics Innovation Lab is a great way for students with no research or no experimental background to get involved,” she says. “I'm really excited to see a lot more undergraduate students be able to experiment and see if that's something that they want to do—hands-on, experimental physics.” Frisk says her involvement with the machine shop and with the PIL has helped her find a comfort-zone in the Physics Department.
Indeed, the PIL will address a catch-22 situation for undergraduates, especially students from underrepresented backgrounds, says Assistant Professor Eric Y. Ma. That is, most principal investigators require candidate undergraduate research assistants for Berkeley Physics laboratories to have had some prior research experience.
“But a lot of undergrad students don't have research experience,” says Ma. “Student experience in the PIL, however, would impart some of that needed experience, and likely reach a much wider student body.”
The PIL is meant to give students agency, says Astronomy Professor Eugene Chiang(link is external). “In real life, and in scientific research, there are no recipes. You have to create it from scratch.”
(L to R) PIL Student Manager Vivian Frisk, Assistant Professor Eric Ma, and Student Machine Shop Manager Jesse Lopez