A gift of the F. W. Olin Foundation, Olin Hall was built to house the Department of Physics in 1958. The lobby just outside the building’s main entrance contains a wall made from Tennessee greenstone marble bearing a memorial plaque honoring Franklin W. Olin, a pioneering chemical industrialist who founded the Olin Corporation. Facilities in Olin Hall include equipment for research on the optical properties of solids, light-scattering and laser spectroscopy of semiconductors, glass fibers, and complex fluids. At one point, the building contained to the nation’s only Van de Graaff accelerator—a device that creates high-voltage static electricity—used by undergraduate students.
