Department of Physics
Department of Physics Research
Research by Discipline
An applied branch of physics concerned with the application of the concepts and methods of physics to the diagnosis, management, and treatment of human disease. It is allied with medical electronics, bioengineering, and health physics.
Faculty
The goal of high energy physics is to understand the most fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions, and the origin, nature, and fate of the universe. Using powerful accelerators and particle detectors, we can study what comes from the small Big-Bangs to answer the deepest questions about the nature of space and time, the origin, nature, and fate of the universe.
Faculty
Astronomy is the science of everything beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Astronomy is the oldest of the sciences. It is here that humankind’s interest in science began. "To boldly go where no one has gone before" isn't a cliché here: it's what we do.
Faculty
Condensed Matter Physics is the study of the properties and mechanisms in crystalline and amorphous solids and liquids. Matter Physics is the largest field in Physics and highly interdisciplinary with Chemistry, Engineering, and the life sciences. Most of the development in modern technology is related to Condensed Matter Physics.
Faculty
Physics Education seeks to examine the historical, current, and possible future methods of teaching physics. It is an area of research that utilizes models and techniques to characterize and assess learning difficulties and develops measures to quantify learning gains.
Faculty
Theoretical Physics seeks to take the enormous complexity of the universe that we see around us – the afterglow of the Big Bang, stars fusing hydrogen to helium, the motion planets around the Sun, the phenomenon of lighting, the binding of quarks into protons and neutrons – and tries to give a single underlying physical principle to explain all of these phenomenon. This effort has led to the Standard Model of particle physics (which explains the small scale phenomenon in the Universe) and General Relativity (which explains the large scale phenomenon in the Universe). Current efforts seek to combine these two pillars of theoretical physics into a single theory.
Faculty
Computational physics is a new branch of physics, and it addresses the question: how can we use a computer to deepen our understanding of the laws of nature? It is a highly interdisciplinary field where fundamental physics and mathematics “join forces” with sophisticated programming techniques, artificial intelligence, design of new computers and related disciplines.
Faculty