Department of Physics
Department of Physics started functioning in 2010 at Riverside Transit Campus, Padannakkad. Our current areas of research are Condensed Matter Physics (Theory and Experiment), Photonics, Materials Science, and Nuclear Physics. Currently there are six regular faculty members in the Department.
The Department of Physics offers a two year M.Sc.programme (20 admissions each year) in addition to the regular Ph. D programme. We currently have 36 M. Sc students, and 23 research students. The first PhD from the department was awarded in the current academic year.
The Department has well-equipped teaching laboratories including modern experimental setups for achieving high standards in learning. The curriculum is framed in such a way that students are able to achieve sound theoretical foundation and problem solving skills in all subjects, and exposure to a range of research areas is provided through a choice of elective courses. M.Sc. students are given hands-on training in all aspects of the subject being taught, from computation to sophisticated experiments, and they also undertake research projects in various research groups as part of the curriculum. We encourage our students to present their work in conferences, and to publish their work in journals. We do give much emphasis to presentation skills and writing skills, and train/encourage students to appear for national level exams such as GATE and NET.
Experimental facilities for research include a Vibrating Sample Magnetometer, Table top XRD system, thin film fabrication facilities including RF sputtering, nuclear data acquisition system, as well as various analytical instruments. A computational laboratory featuring Apple workstations, Dell workstations, and softwares such as Matlab, Mathematica, VASP (Materials Design), Gaussian, Comsol etc. support the theoretical work in both teaching and research. A computer cluster (“PHOTON”) with 64 processing cores is also part of the Computing laboratory. Our library has a very good collection of textbooks of core courses, and advanced books and journals on topical research areas.
We currently hold seven research projects from various funding agencies of Govt. of India. We publish regularly in International Journals. We are also engaged in a number of collaborative research projects.