The Department of Physics at the

Illinois Institute of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the merger of the Armour Institute and Lewis Institute in 1940. The university has prog ...

has over 30 faculty members. It offers undergraduate academic programs including B.S. in physics, applied physics, and physics education and graduate programs in physics and health physics. Many notable physicists have both taught and studied at IIT including

Nobel Prize for Physics ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...

laureates

Leon M. Lederman Leon Max Lederman (July 15, 1922 – October 3, 2018) was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf P ...

and

Jack Steinberger Jack Steinberger (born Hans Jakob Steinberger; May 25, 1921December 12, 2020) was a German-born American physicist noted for his work with neutrinos, the subatomic particles considered to be elementary constituents of matter. He was a recipient ...

Academics

Undergraduate academics

Bachelor of Science degrees are given in: Applied Physics, Astrophysics, Physics, and Physics Education. There are also Co-terminal Bachelor of Science degree programs in Physics/Master of Science in Physics and in Physics/Master of Health Physics.

Graduate academics

Master's degrees are given in: Health Physics, Applied Physics, and Physics. The Doctor of Philosophy degree in Physics is also offered.

Current research

Current research includes: * Involvement in the

Double Chooz Double Chooz was a short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment in Chooz, France. Its goal was to measure or set a limit on the ''θ''13 mixing angle, a neutrino oscillation parameter responsible for changing electron neutrinos into other neut ...

collaboration. The experiment is intended to measure the θ₁₃ neutrino mixing angle. * The MINOS experiment at Fermilab which studies neutrino oscillations. * The

Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment is a China-based multinational particle physics project studying neutrinos. The multinational collaboration includes researchers from China, Chile, the United States, Taiwan (Republic of China), Russia, ...

. The experiment performed a precision measurement of the θ₁₃ neutrino mixing angle. * The

MicroBooNE MicroBooNE is a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. It is located in the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) beamline where neutrinos are produced by colliding protons from Fermilab's booster-accelerator on a b ...

experiment. A short baseline accelerator neutrino experiment for the development of LAr technologies. Plan to study the MiniBooNE low-energy excess and perform cross section measurements of neutrino interactions in LAr. * The PROSPECT experiment. A short baseline reactor antineutrino experiment searching for evidence of sterile neutrinos and a precision measurement of the U235 spectrum. *

International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment The International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (or MICE) is a high energy physics experiment at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The experiment is a recognized CERN experiment (RE11). MICE is designed to demonstrate ionization cooling o ...

History

Faculty timeline

Notable people

, winner of the 1988

, discoverer of the bottom quark, and Director Emeritus of

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been opera ...

was a professor at IIT. Robert F. Christy taught at IIT before going on to be a part of the

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...

. His insights greatly simplified the design of a plutonium based warhead; the solid-core plutonium model is often referred to as the "Christy gadget". Lee De Forest, one of "the fathers of the electronic age" and the man who brought sound to motion pictures was an IIT physics faculty member. The world's first radio astronomer,

Grote Reber Grote Reber (December 22, 1911 – December 20, 2002) was an American pioneer of radio astronomy, which combined his interests in amateur radio and amateur astronomy. He was instrumental in investigating and extending Karl Jansky's pioneering wo ...

, is an IIT alum.

Watts Humphrey Watts S. Humphrey (July 4, 1927 – October 28, 2010) was an American pioneer in software engineering who was called the "father of software quality." Biography Watts Humphrey (whose grandfather and father also had the same name) was born in ...

, "Father of software quality", earned a Masters in physics from IIT.

studied at IIT before dropping out to support his family. He later won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Sidney Coleman Sidney Richard Coleman (7 March 1937 – 18 November 2007) was an American theoretical physicist noted for his research in high-energy theoretical physics. Life and work Sidney Coleman grew up on the Far North Side of Chicago. In 1957, h ...

, best known for his contributions to quantum field theory, received his B.S. from IIT. Nobel laureate

Sheldon Glashow Sheldon Lee Glashow (, ; born December 5, 1932) is a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Harvard U ...

says of Coleman, ""He's not a Stephen Hawking; he has virtually no visibility outside. But within the community of theoretical physicists, he's kind of a major god. He is the physicist's physicist." Raymond A. Serway, author of several undergraduate physics textbooks, received his doctorate from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

References

{{Illinois Institute of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology Physics departments in the United States