The Department of Physics at Georgetown University is committed to research and education. Our faculty collaborate with undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars from all over the world. As part of training new generations of researchers, we provide a strong framework for interdisciplinary initiatives and partnerships with government and industry.

Our community of researchers engage in experimental and theoretical research on condensed matter physics. Condensed matter physics is a broad field of physics that deals with the macroscopic and microscopic physical properties of matter. It attempts to understand the properties of matter from fundamental physical principles and is by far the largest field of contemporary physics. Our efforts on the experimental side include superconductivity, nanodevices, semiconductors, soft matter, biophysics, neural networks, nonlinear dynamics, optics, photovoltaic devices and biomedical imaging, industrial and applied physics, and renewable energy generation and storage. Theoretical efforts include the calculation of structural and electronic properties of materials, strongly correlated systems, transport in multilayered nanostructures, statistical physics of the nonequilibrium dynamics of classical and quantum systems, superconductivity, and ultracold gases in optical lattices. We invite you to find out more about the activities of our department by exploring the links provided on this page.

Experimental Condensed Matter Physics

Paola Barbara — superconductivity, superconducting devices, transport properties of nanowires and nanoscale electronic devices

Daniel Blair — soft glasses, colloidal and polymer physics, crumpling, biopolymer rheology, confocal microscopy of soft materials, granular dynamics and statics

John Currie — materials science of thin solid films, industrial and applied physics, surface and interface chemical physics, semiconductor electrical and electro-optical devices and technology, renewable energy generation and storage, polymer physics, electrochemistry, environment monitoring technologies

Rhonda Dzakpasu — spatio-temporal pattern formation in in vitro neural systems, extracellular multi-electrode array recordings, computational modeling of coherent activity in neural networks, development of non-linear methods of data analysis

Ryan McAllister — cellular biophysics, cancer cell motility and invasion, live-cell imaging, fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics

Makarand Paranjape — micro-/nano-technologies for sensors, actuators, and structural systems, silicon/polymer and carbon nanotube device fabrication, biomedical engineering

Jeff Urbach — cellular biophysics, physics of soft matter, biomaterials, biomedical optics, granular dynamics, fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics

Edward Van Keuren — optics, nanoparticle synthesis and characterization, application of nanoparticles for organic photovoltaic devices and biomedical imaging and therapy

Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics

David Egolf — statistical physics of nonequilibrium dynamical systems, including fluids, granular media, cardiac and neural tissue, and biopolymer networks; effective theories of QCD.

Jim Freericks — strongly correlated electrons (charge and thermal transport and nonequilibrium effects), transport in multilayered nanostructures, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, ultracold atoms in optical lattices (especially mixtures, dipolar molecules, and the Hubbard model)

Amy Liu — structural, electronic, and vibrational properties of materials, including novel superconductors, thermoelectrics, charge-density-wave solids, clusters, and materials under pressure; simulation of calcium dynamics in cells

Marcos Rigol — strongly correlated quantum many-body systems, quantum phase transitions and quantum criticality, nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum systems, superconductivity, ultracold gases in optical lattices, magnetism, disorder, computational physics