LSU
Louisiana State University began as Louisiana State Agricultural & Mechanical College, which was established by an act of the legislature, approved April 7, 1874, to carry out the U. S. Morrill Act of 1862, granting lands for this purpose. It temporarily opened in New Orleans, June 1, 1874, where it remained until it merged with Louisiana State University in 1877. The land for the current LSU campus was purchased in 1918, construction started in 1922, and the move to the campus began in 1925. It was not, however, until 1932 that the move was finally completed. The campus was dedicated April 30, 1926. LSU’s landscaping was called a “botanical joy” and is listed among the 20 most beautiful campuses in America in Thomas Gaines’ The Campus as a Work of Art. Since its beginnings in 1860, LSU's history has been a story of growth and transformation. Several existing centers or institutes make the research environment at LSU unique. LSU has the only state funded synchrotron radiation facility, the J. Bennett Johnston Sr. Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices and the Center for Computation, Technology leading the way in High Performance Computing, and Louisiana Optical Network Initiative. LSU has received major funding from NSF for the Louisiana Alliance for Simulation-Guided Materials Application and from DOE for an Energy Frontier Research Center titled “Center for Atomic-Level Catalysis Design”.
Areas of research activity:
- Discovering new complex materials and phenomena
- Physics & chemistry at Surfaces: broken symmetry
- Emergent behavior in spatially confined complex materials
- Quantum critical behavior Physics in cold atom gases
- Condensed matter theory
- Extreme scale simulations of complex materials
- Materials characterization with synchrotron radiations