GRADUATE PROGRAM

Graduate students Lik Wee Lee and Vidya Kumar in Zack Schlesinger's lab.

The Physics Department offers graduate programs leading to the M.S. and/or the Ph.D. degrees. A national survey of over 32,000 graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s gave UCSC's Physics Department "the highest rating for overall student satisfaction of any physics program in the country". Some of the criteria for that ranking included “mentoring, program climate, and controlling the time it takes to earn a degree.”

We continue to offer a first rate academic experience to our incoming students. The student-faculty ratio is low so that M.S. and Ph.D. students can work closely with faculty and pursue programs that fit their individual needs. Research is currently conducted in theoretical and experimental particle physics, theoretical and experimental astrophysics and cosmology, theoretical and experimental condensed matter physics, materials physics, biophysics, and synchrotron radiation. After passing a written qualifying examination, Ph.D. students pursue independent research and oral examinations leading to Advancement to Candidacy and completion of a dissertation. Master’s candidates are encouraged to write a research thesis and may do so in any of the research fields in the program, thereby developing laboratory and computational skills in areas such as electronics design, computer simulation and visualization, cryogenics, X-ray scattering, complex novel materials and devices, or materials science. [More info about our requirements]

Physics students and faculty use a number of UCSC research facilities: Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP), University of California Observatories (headquartered at UCSC), Institute of Marine Sciences, and the Institute of Tectonics. There is strong interaction with other disciplines, especially astronomy and astrophysics, biology, chemistry, Earth sciences, electrical engineering, and mathematics. Proximity to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory provides additional local research opportunities. UCSC faculty and graduate students also are actively working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (ATLAS experiment), on GLAST, and conducting research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NASA Ames, NREL, Lucent, Xerox, IBM, Bell Labs, and other national and international laboratories. [More info about our research]