News

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Representatives from Cornell, the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the New York State Energy Research Development Agency are shown during the CBETA test June 24 at Wilson Laboratory.

New accelerator sails through key test – recovering energy

A half-century after the idea of energy-recovering accelerators was proposed at Cornell, the university is showing that high-energy physics can also be renewable-energy physics.

Image of campus from the columns outside Baker Lab

Three A&S faculty win White House early career awards

The White House has recognized four Cornell faculty members – Thomas Hartman, Jenny Kao-Kniffin, Kin Fai Mak and Rebecca Slayton – with prestigious 2019 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Department Events

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OCT 02Chats in the Stacks: Steve Strogatz on Infinite Powe... Calculus, the mathematical study of continuous change, underpins some of the most fundamental and miraculous achievements of humankind, from determining the area of a circle to enabling innovations...

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Research Spotlight

Research in the department is organized in two laboratories, the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics (LASSP) and the Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics (LEPP). Explore the links below to learn more about the major research areas of the department and the facilities available to researchers.

Juliane Scholtz '19 Physics and German Undergraduate major

Student Spotlights

Have humility. You will get many blows to your pride while you are here, because you are not (yet!) as smart as you think you are. Over time, however, you will learn how to think, and will see that understanding "why" is far more important than memorizing facts and equations.

Juliane Scholtz '19

Read more about Juliane's story here.

I'm most proud of the fact that I've been able to become involved in cutting-edge physics research. For example, with Professor Julia Thom-Levy's group, I have worked on the CMS detector at CERN, which investigates the properties of the fundamental particles that make up the universe. I am lucky to have been able to contribute to upgrades to the detector, as well as to perform analyses aiming to measure unobserved physical phenomena, working both at Cornell and at CERN. Working on such projects enabled me to utilize skills learned in both my physics and computer science classes, as well as develop new skills.

Chase Goddard '19

Data visualization could reveal nature of the universe

Next-gen particle accelerator is aim of Bright Beams work

Machine learning unlocks mysteries of quantum physics

Gravitational waves leave a detectable mark, physicists say