Department of Physics
Department Website: http://www.physics.iitm.ac.in
The Department of Physics currently has 47 faculty members and 25 technical and supporting staff members. It offers B.Tech. in Engineering Physics, M.Sc. (2 year programme) in Physics, B.S.-M.S. Dual Degree in Physics (5 year programme), M.Tech. (2 year programme) in Solid State Technology and Ph.D. degree in Physics.
The core courses offered in the Department include Classical Mechanics, Mathematical Physics, Statistical Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Electromagnetic Theory, Condensed Matter Physics, Electronics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, Nuclear and Particle Physics and Numerical Methods. A number of elective courses are offered covering broad topics that include Lasers, Modern Optics, Electronics, Low Temperature Physics, Science and Technology of Nanomaterials, Theoretical Computational Physics. The students undertake project works in various areas to gain exposure to advanced level research topics in Physics.
The research and development activities of the Department encompass different areas of Condensed Matter Physics, Lasers, Photonics, Theoretical and Computational Physics. Some of the specific areas are: Low Temperature Physics, Superconductivity, Thin Films, Heterostructures and Nanostructures, Microwave Materials, Magnetic Materials and Magnetic Resonance, Ultrafast Phenomena, Holography, Imaging and Photonic Materials, Photonics and Laser Physics, Semiconductor, Transport and Dielectric Properties of Material, Solid State Ionics, Physics and Application of Nanomaterials, Atomic and Molecular Physics, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, Classical and Quantum Field Theory, Quantum Computing and Quantum Information Theory, String Theory, Theoretical Biophysics, Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Soft Condensed Matter Physics and Experimental High Energy Physics.
The Department is equipped with several major facilities in its laboratories. These include Helium and Nitrogen Liquefiers, Thin-film Coating Units (PLD, Sputtering etc.), He-Ne Lasers, Argon Ion Laser, Excimer Laser, Ruby laser, Nd-YAG laser, Tunable diode lasers, X-ray diffractometer, UV-Visible spectrometer, Confocal Raman spectrometer, Vibrating sample magnetometer, MPMS SQUID magnetometer, TGA and DSC, impedance analyzer, Photoluminescence, etc. The Department has a modern Applied Optics Laboratory and facilities such as physical properties measurement system (PPMS), HFCVD, MWCVD, FESEM and HRTEM as part of the Nano Functional Materials Technology Centre (NFMTC). A machine shop facility is available to assist research and teaching laboratories.
A Department Computing Facility (DCF) is available for research-oriented and general purpose computing by Physics students and faculty. At present there are several desktop machines, servers running on GNU/Linux, with most of the standard scientific computation packages installed. The Department publishes quality research papers in reputed international journals. Further information is available in the website http://www.physics.iitm.ac.in.