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The Cornell University Department of Physics, known for the versatility of its program, the breadth of its training, and Nobel Prize-winning work, is unsurpassed in many areas. The presence on campus of a particle accelerator, one of just a few of its magnitude anywhere in the world, contributes to Cornell’s reputation in particle and accelerator physics. The department has more than 40 active professors, approximately 180 graduate students and 65 undergraduate majors, and offers a full range of university-level work in physics, from general education courses for nonscientists to doctoral-level independent research.
The Bethe Way is the department's yearly magazine. In it, we share exciting highlights of faculty hires, research breakthroughs, staff changes, teaching reform, faculty awards, and alumni connections.
Planning to harness the power of AI are A&S researchers from physics; ecology and evolutionary biology; chemistry and chemical biology; and neurobiology and behavior
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Physicists Matthias Liepe and James Sethna were recognized for having made "exceptional contributions" to physics.
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Research in the realm of accelerator physics focuses a lot on where you get the particles from. My group’s expertise is creating and manipulating electron beams. We’re typically interested in studying a process called photon emission by way of using light to impinge on a specially engineered materia...
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I joined the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2005. The project then was already in the middle of construction and primarily I worked on the pixel detector and getting that ready for data taking, which started in 2010. But already I was thinking about what...
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As a graduate student in Germany at a national research lab, students weren’t allowed to do many thing for themselves. My advisor sent me to Cornell for six months to learn how to do things. In Newman Lab, the students do everything – how to use the clean room, how to solder, etc. So after I finishe...
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A model system created by stacking a pair of monolayer semiconductors is giving physicists a simpler way to study confounding quantum behavior.
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Accelerator physics has revealed hidden universes, from the Higgs boson to what can be seen on a CT scan – and much of that progress is thanks to work done in an unassuming building tucked away on Cornell’s north campus: Newman Lab.
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A world expert at using mechanical strain to precisely manipulate the properties of materials, Malinowski is particularly interested in superconductors.
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"On my first day after joining a research group in graduate school a professor said, I hear you’re interested in instrumentation.’ I didn’t know what that was, but I thought I’d better say yes. When people think about physics, they think about a guy with a pencil and paper, but physics is an experimental science.”
- Peter Wittich, Professor and Director, Laboratory of Elementary Particle Physics