Research Groups

Research in the Department of Physics covers a broad range of activities. Click on the name of a group to jump from the synopsis to a more complete description of the group's activities.

• Accelerators and Beam Physics is concerned with the development of novel accelerator concepts, Free-Electron Lasers and instrumentation. This work is carried out at nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory and includes Stony Brook adjunct faculty and graduate students. (ATF WWW page)
• The Astronomy faculty are interested in many areas of Astrophysics: Extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, including studies of the Hubble Deep Field which contains the most distant galaxies ever seen; Radio and millimeter-wave studies of molecular clouds and galaxies and the stratosphere); Nuclear Astrophysics, including studies of supernovae, neutron stars, the equation of state, and merging neutron star binaries; Star formation and properties of low mass (cool) stars observed with IR, optical and X-radiation; and studies of supergiants and space interferometry. (Astronomy WWW page)
• In Atmospheric Physics, molecular spectroscopy is applied to the study of stratospheric trace gases that regulate the chemical equilibrium of ozone, radiative heating and cooling of the atmosphere, and other physical processes. The work is carried out in collaboration with NASA scientists, and with other faculty in Stony Brook's Institute for Terrestrial and Planetary Atmospheres.
• The Condensed Matter - Experimental and Device Physics group studies fundamental phenomena such as phase transitions and electronic and magnetic properties of materials, and does applied research on devices based on superconductor and semiconductor structures. (Buckyball WWW page, Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) logic WWW page, Single Electron Tunneling (SET) WWW page, Powder Diffraction WWW page, World's Fastest Digital IC WWW page).
• The Condensed Matter - Theory group is interested in the theory of superconductors. The group has played a major role in the theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect, and in the development of the ideas of "single electron" and "single flux quantum" device physics.
• The High Energy Physics - Experimental group studies fundamental forces through energetic collisions between particles in settings ranging from the 2 TeV collider at Fermilab, to proton decays and cosmic neutrinos in the Super Kamiokonde experiment in Japan, to the 14 TeV LHC collider at CERN. (High Energy Group WWW page).
• The C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics under director Peter van Nieuwenhuizen is dedicated to research in fundamental theory such as the standard model of elementary particles, string theory, supersymmetry, and statistical mechanics. (YITP WWW page)
• The Nuclear and Heavy Ion Physics - Experimental group operates a superconducting linear accelerator for nuclear physics research on campus (including the recently-reported trapping of francium), and uses the AGS accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory (and RHIC when it becomes available) for research on relativistic heavy ion physics. (Nuclear Physics WWW page)
  The Relativistic Heavy Ion - Experimental Group is an active member of the PHENIX collaboration at Brookhaven National Laboratories (BNL). Phenix is one of the two experiments on the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) at BNL. RHIC will collide high energy heavy ions to create matter at extremely large density. These collisions will create the conditions which exist during the first microsecond after the big bang, and it is expected that the quarks will no longer be confined inside hadrons, but will form a new phase of matter - the quark-gluon plasma. Here at Stony Brook are being built two of the detectors of the PHENIX experiment: the RICH (Ring Imaging CHerenkov detector) and the Drift Chamber. On the software side, the group is working on writing the complex code that allow the experiment to reconstruct the tracks originated from the collision point and on the analysis of the events to study the physics that could confirm experimentally the existance of the quark-gluon plasma. Please contact the professors M.Marx, B. Jacak, T. Hemmick, A. Dress. Visit the PHENIX Home Page at Stony Brook for more details.
• The Nuclear Physics - Theory group is working on the theory of hadronic matter (including conditions such as those which will be produced at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider which is soon to begin operations at Brookhaven National Laboratory), and nuclear astrophysics (such as the theory of supernovae). (Nuclear Physics WWW page)
• Optics - Quantum Electronics, and Atomic and Molecular Physics group includes a broad range of activities, including the laser spectroscopy and cooling to microKelvin temperatures, quantum chaos. (Optics WWW page, QEX WWW page)
• Optics - X-ray Optics and Microscopy group studies x-ray optics and microscopy of biological and materials science applications. (X-ray Microscopy WWW page)

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