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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.
Microscopic machines engineered by Cornell researchers can autonomously synchronize their movements, opening new possibilities for the use of microrobots in drug delivery, chemical mixing and environmental remediation, among other applications.
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Cornell researchers in physics and engineering have created the smallest walking robot yet. Its mission: to be tiny enough to interact with waves of visible light and still move independently, so that it can maneuver, and take images and measurements.
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Students venture out onto Cayuga Lake for hands-on learning about wind speed, velocity, buoyancy, and more
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Cornell researchers have identified the highest achievable superconducting temperature of graphene – 60 Kelvin. The finding is mathematically exact and is spurring new insights into the factors that fundamentally control superconductivity.
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Yuval Grossman, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society for seminal contributions in “flavor” physics.
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The conference focused on the current status and future of heavy quark physics while highlighting the science Lepage has done throughout his career.
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Elijah Sheridan, a doctoral student in physics from Lansing, Michigan, studies string theory under the guidance of Liam McAllister at Cornell.
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Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto were honored for their work in training artificial neural networks.
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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