Physics at UT

The University of Texas at Austin, established in 1883, is a major research institution. It is the largest member of The University of Texas System, with an enrollment of about forty-eight thousand students, including over eleven thousand graduate students. At present, over two thousand faculty teach courses in sixteen colleges and schools, and supervise master’s and doctoral work in over 90 fields of study. The University provides an outstanding program in most areas of academic specialization.

The Physics Department is an internationally recognized research institution and ranks well in the National Research Council surveys of research-doctorate programs in the United States. More importantly, our national rankings have been steadily improving over the years, and future growth and development should place the Department as one of the best in the nation.

The Physics Department faculty presently consists of sixty members. Two professors in the Department, Ilya Prigogine (deceased) and Steven Weinberg, have been honored by the Swedish Academy; Prigogine was named the 1977 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Weinberg received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979. Three members of the Department are members of the National Academy of Science. Approximately half of the faculty are experimentalists while the other half are theorists. An indication of the dynamic growth of the Department is that fifteen young faculty were hired over the last decade. Areas of research cover atomic, molecular and optical physics, nonlinear dynamics, nuclear physics, plasma physics, fluid dynamics, condensed matter physics, relativity and cosmology, statistical mechanics, and elementary particle physics. In addition to the individual research groups, there are seven different centers in the department: the Theory Group, directed by Steven Weinberg; the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, directed by Harry Swinney; the Institute for Fusion Studies, directed by François Waelbroeck; the Center for Particles and Fields, directed by Jack Ritchie; the Center for Relativity, directed by Richard Matzner; and the Center for Complex Quantum Systems, directed by Linda Reichl.

The Department enjoys close research collaborations with scientists in other departments with related research interests. Several faculty members belong to the Science and Technology Center (STC), the Texas Materials Institute (TMI), and the Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (TICAM). Industrial collaborations have expanded in recent years with the growth of the “high-tech” base in Austin. The strong support of basic and applied research by the State of Texas through the Advanced Research and Advanced Technology Programs has enabled the development of new research directions in the Physics Department, and is an indication of a deep commitment to academic excellence.

The graduate program in the Physics Department currently enrolls approximately two hundred and seventy students. Students who are accepted to the program are generally offered teaching assistant positions. Many students become research assistants after they join research groups. Recruitment of top students is a very high priority for the Physics Department, and it has been able to compete successfully with the very best schools. Incoming students are encouraged to identify areas of interest and to find faculty advisors early in their program.

The Physics Department occupies an area of over 190,000 square feet in Robert Lee Moore Hall (RLM). This building is shared with Mathematics and Astronomy, and has complete facilities for state-of-the-art laboratories.