The University of Pennsylvania Department of Physics and Astronomy combines world-leading science with the intimate faculty-student community unique to small departments. We are among the smallest of all Physics and Astronomy Departments of the top 25, but we have labs and facilities comparable to some national laboratories, and we often top the list of most highly-cited research.
We have three broad areas of research: Condensed Matter Physics, which includes experimental and theoretical work in hard condensed matter, quantum materials, soft condensed matter, biophysics, and living matter; Astronomy, which at Penn includes theoretical and experimental astronomy, dark energy and dark matter, galactic observations and modeling, and extrasolar planet searches; and Particle Physics, which on the experimental side includes higgs and SUSY searches at ATLAS, and low- and high-energy neutrino physics with experiments like SNO+, T2K, and DUNE, and on the theoretical side includes string theory and phenomenology, broad and deep explorations of field theory, and implications for cosmology.
