Faculty: 30
Staff: 62
Post Docs: 16
Grads: 59
Under Grads: 101
Research Areas:
Astronomy/Astrophysics, Atomic & Molecular Physics,
Condensed Matter/Materials Physics, Elementary Particle
Physics, Medical Imaging Physics & Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
Physics, Nuclear Physics, Photonics and Quantum
Electronics, Plasma Physics, Space Physics
Facilities:
The Department is home to the interdisciplinary Optical Science
and Technology Center (OSTC) located in the state-of-the-art Iowa
Advanced Technology Laboratories (IATL). Facilities in the IATL include ultrafast lasers, two molecular beam epitaxy machines for III-V semiconductor growth, and systems for organic semiconductor growth. The students and faculty
also use off campus facilites at CERN, SLAC, Fermilab, and the Very
Large Array radio telescope. The Department has student-run,
computer controlled, optical observatories in Arizona and on the roof
of Van Allen Hall.
'The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative... '