The Physics Department at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an ...

has 58 faculty members. It offers academic programs leading to the

B.A. A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree ...

, B.S., and

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

degrees.

Faculty Awards

As of 2014, the department counts three

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; ; ) are awards administered by the Nobel Foundation and granted in accordance with the principle of "for the greatest benefit to humankind". The prizes were first awarded in 1901, marking the fifth anniversary of Alfred N ...

winners among its faculty:

David Gross David Jonathan Gross (; born February 19, 1941) is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of asymptotic freedom. ...

(2004, Physics),

Alan J. Heeger Alan Jay Heeger (born January 22, 1936) is an American physicist, academic and Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry. Heegar was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 for co-founding the field of conducting polymers ...

(2000, Chemistry), and

Walter Kohn Walter Kohn (; March 9, 1923 – April 19, 2016) was an Austrian-American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the un ...

(1998, Chemistry).Nobel Prizes in Physics
/ref> Physics Nobel Prize winners

Herbert Kroemer Herbert Kroemer (; August 25, 1928 – March 8, 2024) was a German-American physicist who, along with Zhores Alferov, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for "developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electro ...

(2000) and

Shuji Nakamura is a Japanese electronic engineer, inventor of the blue LED, a major breakthrough in lighting technology, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014. Nakamura specializes in the field of semiconductor technology, and he is a professo ...

(2014) are both professors of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials Departments at UCSB. The Physics Department's faculty includes 13 members of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

: Guenter Ahlers, Matthew Fisher,

James Hartle James Burkett Hartle (August 17, 1939 – May 17, 2023) was an American theoretical physicist. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966, and was a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. Hart ...

Alan Heeger Alan Jay Heeger (born January 22, 1936) is an American physicist, academic and Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry. Heegar was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 for co-founding the field of conducting polymers ...

, Gary Horowitz,

Joseph Incandela Joseph Incandela is an American particle physicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and currently based at CERN, where he spent two years as the spokesperson for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Lar ...

, James Langer,

Joseph Polchinski Joseph Gerard Polchinski Jr. (; May 16, 1954 – February 2, 2018) was an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Biography Polchinski was born in White Plains, New York, the elder of two children to Joseph Gerard Polchinski Sr. (19 ...

, Douglas Scalapino, Boris Shraiman, and Michael Witherell. Heeger is also a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

. Guenter Ahlers, Matthew Fisher,

, Gary Horowitz,

, James Langer,

, Douglas Scalapino, and

Anthony Zee Anthony Zee ( zh, t=徐一鴻, born 1945) (Zee comes from /ʑi23/, the Shanghainese pronunciation of 徐) is a Chinese-American physicist, writer, and a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of th ...

have all been elected to membership in the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

shared the 2012 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with six other physicists for the discovery of the

Higgs boson The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the excited state, quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the field (physics), fields in particl ...

Academics

Undergraduate academics

The standard program, which is in the College of Letters and Science (L&S), leads to either a

or B.S. degree. The B.S. program is for those aiming for a career in physics, while the B.A. is a more flexible program allowing more courses from other areas. Within the B.S. program there are three possible schedules of courses - a standard track, an advanced track, and an honors track - leading to a degree in four years. These tracks include increasingly more electives and undergraduate research. UCSB conferred 66 bachelor's degrees in physics in 2013, which represents the sixth largest graduating physics class among U.S. universities.American Institute of Physics, Roster of Physics Departments, 2013
/ref>

Graduate academics

The graduate program was ranked fifth (or sixth, depending on which method used) among physics program in the 2011 study by the National Research Council. ''U.S. News & World Report'' ranked the graduate program tenth in the country across all subfields, third in Condensed Matter Physics, fifth in Quantum Physics, eighth in Elementary Particles/Field/String Theory, and ninth in Cosmology/Relativity/Gravity. The graduate program awarded a total of 20 Ph.D. degrees in 2013.

Research Programs and Institutes

The faculty members conduct and supervise research in

Astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline, James Keeler, said, astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the ...

Cosmology Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe, the cosmos. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', with the meaning of "a speaking of the wo ...

Biophysics Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations ...

Condensed Matter Physics Condensed matter physics is the field of physics that deals with the macroscopic and microscopic physical properties of matter, especially the solid and liquid State of matter, phases, that arise from electromagnetic forces between atoms and elec ...

Gravitation In physics, gravity (), also known as gravitation or a gravitational interaction, is a fundamental interaction, a mutual attraction between all massive particles. On Earth, gravity takes a slightly different meaning: the observed force b ...

, and

Particle Physics Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of Elementary particle, fundamental particles and fundamental interaction, forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the s ...

. In 2011 The Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked the UCSB department eleventh in the world, ninth in the United States. In a ranking of physics departments by citations per faculty member, UCSB is first with 178 citations per faculty member. Physics professor

Lars Bildsten Lars Bildsten (born 1964) is an American astrophysicist, best known for his work on the physics of white dwarfs and their explosions as Type Ia supernovae. He is the sixth director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Univer ...

is Director of the

Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) is a research institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara dedicated to theoretical physics. KITP is one of 20 Kavli Foundation (United_States)#The Kavli Institutes, Kavli Institutes ...

(KITP) and all of its permanent members are also faculty of the Physics Department. Several faculty members carry out their research at the

California NanoSystems Institute The California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) is an integrated research center operating jointly at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. Its missions are to foster interdisciplinary collaborations for discoveries in nanosystems and nanotechnology; train the ...

at UC Santa Barbara, or the Institute for Terahertz Science and Technology.Institute for Terahertz Research and Technology
/ref> Four faculty members from the department lead a large UCSB research group working at the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, ...

using the

Compact Muon Solenoid The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland and France. The goal of the CMS experiment is to investigate a wide range ...

(CMS). UCSB Professor

is the spokesperson for the CMS collaboration. On 4 July 2012, Incandela spoke on behalf of CMS, where the discovery of a previously unknown boson with mass 125.3 ± 0.6 GeV/c² was announced.

References

External links

The UCSB Physics Department
{{UCSB * University of California, Santa Barbara Physics departments in the United States Physicists from California zh:聖塔芭芭拉加利福尼亞大學#物理系