Introduction to the Department of Physics

The Department currently has a faculty of about 42 members, along with approximately 50 postdoctoral fellows and research scientists. The graduate student enrollment is currently 145. The Department offers full M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree programs in a wide range of disciplines, including astrophysics, condensed matter physics, high energy physics, nuclear physics, atmospheric physics, laser spectroscopy, material physics, bio-physics, statistical physics, non-linear dynamics, and medical radiation physics. Current research topics are listed in the research section of these pages.

Although most of the teaching and research facilities are located in the Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, the Department has space and access to research facilities in the new Wong Materials Science Center, adjacent to the Rutherford Building on McGill's lower campus. Our research groups are also regular users of the facilities at Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne, Il.), Brookhaven National Laboratory (Upton, N.Y.), CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), DESY (Hamburg, Germany), ESRF (Grenoble, France), Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Batavia, Il.), TRIUMF (Vancouver), Sandia National Laboratory (Albuquerque, NM) and Stanford Linear Acelerator Center (Stanford, CA).

The Department also maintains a close tie to the Medical Physics Unit, a unit in the Faculty of Medicine, whose main objective is to join in one academic unit the medical physicists who hold their primary appointments in various clinical departments at McGill or in McGill teaching hospitals.

The Department is well equipped with research facilities such as engineering support, some electronics support, and a machine shop. Most of the scientific computing is done with an extensive network of powerful workstations and several Beowulf clusters. Remote access to supercomputing sites in Canada and the United States is also possible. The Department has access to the McGill University library system containing more than 5 million items, the most extensive in Québec. In particular, the Physical Sciences and Engineering Library is housed in the Macdonald Stewart Library Building, a short walk from the Department of Physics, and contains complete collections of most relevant journals. McGill also has e-access to many journals.

The Physics Department has close contacts with Montréal's other institutions of higher education: Concordia University, l'Université de Montréal, l'Ecole Polytechnique, and the Montréal branch of l'Université du Québec, as well as with l'Université de Sherbrooke in the nearby Eastern Townships and with l'Institut National de Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Varennes.

A face-to-face meeting can sometimes be the best introduction to a new environment. The Department has a small budget for assisting in the travel expenses of prospective students. Please contact us for more information.

To get information about the program, please contact the graduate officer.