School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University

The Department of Physics is the predecessor of our school, with 38 full-time faculty members including 20 full professors, and a current enrollment of 550 undergraduate and 150 postgraduate students. The mission of the physics department is to promote its education, research, and innovation with greatest effort. Physics is the science that deals at the most fundamental level with matter and energy, their interactions, and their transformation. It presents major challenges to the human mind and provides the foundation for other sciences. By pursuing creative research at the frontier of knowledge and innovation at the cutting edge of technology, it is the ultimate purpose of our faculty members to preserve and nurture a sense of wonder about the natural world, and to impart it to the students as a driving motivation for learning.

The Department has a wide variety of specialties and areas in physics, which includes Theoretical Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, Atomic Physics and Molecular Physics, Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics, Plasma Physics, Optics, and Acoustics etc. There is a strong offering of core subjects in the fundamental fields of physics. Undergraduates are encouraged to select areas of concentration in the traditional or applied subjects of physics. Faculty and postgraduate research focuses on condensed matter, optical and theoretical physics, and these include physics of photonics and phononic crystals, soft matter, nano-structure, strongly correlated systems, nonperiodic solids, diffraction, lasers, quantum field and elementary particles, materials, thin films, surfaces, interfaces, polymers and composites. A focused area of interdisciplinary collaboration that has emerged over the years is nanoscience and nanotechnology.

A number of key laboratories and interdisciplinary research centers provide support for the Department's research programs. Particularly relevant are the Center of Electron Microscope, Center of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Key Laboratory of Artificial Micro- and Nano-structures of Ministry of Education, Laboratory of nuclear solid state physics, Accelerator Laboratory, and Positron Laboratory. State-of-the-art facilities for large scale and intensive scientific computation include various workstations, and a parallel processing platform of clustered PCs.