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Physics
J. D. Sullivan, Head
J. P. Wolfe, E. Gladding, Associate Heads
211 Loomis Laboratory of Physics, 1110 W. Green St., MC-704, Urbana, IL 61801-3080
217-333-2761 • http://www.physics.uiuc.edu

Physics is the study of the natural world and the fundamental laws that govern its behavior. The domain of physics is vast, reaching out to the ultimate limits in space and time of the universe and down into the smallest reaches of the subatomic world. The establishment of physics marked the foundation of modern science. The pace and scope of discovery in physics today exceeds that in any previous era, thanks to the sophistication and precision of the instrumentation and computational tools in the hands of physicists today. In many cases, physicists themselves developed these tools in their quest to probe the secrets of nature in new ways.

Many physicists work in interdisciplinary settings. The principles and laws of physics underlie all other natural science and engineering disciplines, including astronomy, biology, computer engineering, and civil engineering. An intimate relationship exists between physics and engineering, as evidenced by many familiar devices upon which our modern lives depend: integrated circuits, magnetic storage media, lasers, optical fiber communications, medical MRI systems, the satellite-based Global Positioning System, and the Internet.

The Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has strong research programs in many of the major fields of the discipline, including:

• hard and soft condensed matter physics,
• high-energy physics,
• nuclear/intermediate energy physics,
• biological physics,
• astrophysics,
• quantum information and optics,
• complex systems and chaos, and
• mathematical physics.

Faculty members, postdoctoral research associates, graduate students, and, increasingly, undergraduate students carry out research in a variety of state-of-the-art facilities: Loomis Laboratory; interdisciplinary facilities on campus such as the Materials Research Laboratory, the Microelectronics Center, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; and national and international laboratories such as Fermilab, Argonne National Laboratory, Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Centre Europeenne pour la Recherché Nucleaire (CERN), and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY).

The department is home to two National Institutes of Health National Resources, the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics and the NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics.

Research funding comes from numerous external supporters, including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Education, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, State of Illinois, American Chemical Society, Carver Charitable Trust, IBM Corporation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Petroleum Research Fund, Research Corporation, Searle Foundation, Semiconductor Research Corporation, Shell Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Sony Corporation, and Xerox Corporation.


Summary of Engineering Research