TheDepartment of Physics at theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara has 58 faculty members.[1] It offers academic programs leading to theB.A.,B.S., andPh.D. degrees.
As of 2014, the department counts threeNobel Prize winners among its faculty:David Gross (2004, Physics),Alan J. Heeger (2000, Chemistry), andWalter Kohn (1998, Chemistry).[2][3] Physics Nobel Prize winnersHerbert Kroemer (2000) andShuji Nakamura (2014) are both professors of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials Departments at UCSB. The Physics Department's faculty includes 13 members of theNational Academy of Sciences: Guenter Ahlers,Matthew Fisher,David Gross,James Hartle,Alan Heeger, Gary Horowitz,Joseph Incandela,Walter Kohn,James Langer,Joseph Polchinski, Douglas Scalapino, Boris Shraiman, and Michael Witherell.[4] Heeger is also a member of theNational Academy of Engineering.[5] Guenter Ahlers,Matthew Fisher,David Gross, Gary Horowitz,Walter Kohn,James Langer,Joseph Polchinski, Douglas Scalapino, andAnthony Zee have all been elected to membership in theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[6]Joseph Incandela shared the 2012 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics[7] with six other physicists for the discovery of theHiggs boson.
The standard program, which is in the College of Letters and Science (L&S), leads to either aB.A. orB.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.[8]UCSB conferred 66 bachelor's degrees in physics in 2013, which represents the sixth largest graduating physics class among U.S. universities.[9]
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.[10]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.[11] The graduate program awarded a total of 20 Ph.D. degrees in 2013.[9]
The faculty members conduct and supervise research inAstrophysics,Cosmology,Biophysics,Condensed Matter Physics,Gravitation, andParticle Physics.[12] In 2011 The Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked the UCSB department eleventh in the world, ninth in the United States.[13] In a ranking of physics departments by citations per faculty member, UCSB is first with 178 citations per faculty member.[14]
Physics professorLars Bildsten is Director of theKavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP)[15] and all of its permanent members are also faculty of the Physics Department. Several faculty members carry out their research at theCalifornia NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara,[16] or the Institute for Terahertz Science and Technology.[17]
Four faculty members from the department lead a large UCSB research group working at theLarge Hadron Collider using theCompact Muon Solenoid (CMS). UCSB ProfessorJoseph Incandela 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.
