Department of Physics

Department of Physics

• Overview
  • Teaching-Learning
  • Capacity Building
  • Student Progression
  • Faculty Achievements
  • Distinguished Alumnae
• Faculty
• Courses
  • B.Sc. (H) Physics
  • B.Sc. Physical Sciences with Computer Science
  • M.Sc. Physics
• Society
• Magazine
• Newsletter

Overview

The Physics Department was constituted in 1972. It started with three faculty members and a batch of 40 students in B.Sc. (Hons.) Physics. The classes were held in the Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi.
The Department shifted to the College in December, 1988. Since then, the Department has grown in terms of academics, research and faculty strength. Today, the Department has over 20 faculty members, bearing diverse research interests. This lends strength to the under-graduate teaching in the Department.

The Department caters to over 400 students every year. Besides offering core papers to students of B.Sc. (Hons.) Physics, the Department offers Generic Elective papers to students of other disciplines, and Physics papers to B.Sc. Applied Physical Sciences.

There are well equipped teaching laboratories, computer labs and a Departmental Library. Laying special emphasis on innovation and quality of the research projects carried out by students, the Department hosts a Project Laboratory, with several state-of-the-art research facilities, and a multidisciplinary Computer-based Laboratory that meets global benchmarks.

Teaching-Learning

With a diverse student population, the Department strives to deliver undergraduate teaching in a meaningful manner and create an environment where students are able to discover their potential. Besides ensuring the availability of prescribed books and supplementary reading material, the department motivates students towards consistent library work. In order to enrich the learning experience of students, faculty members use best-in-line ICT facilities. The Department ensures that internal assessment in the form of assignments, tests and quizzes is done in a manner which provides students the necessary push to excel in their coursework.

Experiential Learning

With the philosophy that teaching-learning should go beyond the classroom, the Department stresses upon project-based learning. All possible opportunities within the course structure are used to motivate students towards independent and active learning through projects, particularly through the Skill Enhancement lab courses (Instrumentation, and Energy Harvesting).

DSKC Summer Workshop

The Department motivates students to go for internship programs and summer projects in various research institutions. D. S. Kothari Center for Research and Innovation in Science Education provides immense opportunities for summer internship programs within the college itself. Under its aegis, an annual undergraduate summer research camp, named Flavor of Research, is conducted, in which the faculty members of the Department work as faculty mentors for these undergraduate projects. This annual summer camp receives enthusiastic participation from students, both from within the Department, and from other colleges, with a typical enrollment of about 100. Students typically continue with their project work even outside the bounds of the formal 6-week duration of this summer camp, making this a year-round undergraduate research activity.

Since the Department lays a strong emphasis on going beyond the bounds of formal prescribed coursework, an active and enthusiastic involvement of students in community building exercises is an important facet of the overall growth.

Vidyut: Creating Synergy

The Department has an active student society, Vidyut, which organizes several activities for students including seminars, workshops and educational trips. This gives an opportunity to students to learn teamwork and to develop leadership qualities. In addition, the Department also has a separate, dedicated Robotics Society, which caters specifically to this exciting sub-discipline, and fosters a spirit of multidisciplinary collaboration by conducting additional student projects and seminars, which receive extensive participation from both Physics, and non-Physics students, such as from Computer Science.

Capacity Building

The Department is committed to creating a nourishing environment where students are able to both discover and realize their complete potential, and grow overall as individuals during the course of their association with the Department. Clearly, formal teaching-learning and the semester-end examination-based-assessment of a student performance is only a small, albeit important, subset of this overall multifaceted growth which the Department strives towards.

The Department fully endorses the perspective that laying a strong emphasis on project-based learning leads to not just a more active involvement of students in the teaching learning process, but serves to develop a research aptitude which is crucially important for creating future researchers. The D S Kothari Center for Research and Innovation helped to bring project-based learning to the center stage in the College. Science Departments in the college have come together to create various platforms, giving opportunities for interdisciplinary and collaborative work. Several labs in the College were created under DSKC, two amongst them in the Physics Department. The Center created an in-house opportunity for students and teachers for doing research. A large number of faculty members in the Physics Department organize and participate in the activities of the Center, and mentor summer research projects. Also, in the last five years, an average of 60 students every year, both from within Miranda House and other colleges/universities, do their Summer Projects at DSKC.

Smart Materials and Devices Laboratory (SMDL): New opportunities

Availability of multiple sets of state-of-the-art research equipment, is immensely helpful in running various capacity building programs. In this regard, Smart Materials and Devices Laboratory (SMDL), which has been set up by Professor Monika Tomar through numerous grants, has added new opportunities for students. The SMDL features Processing lab for growth of thin films and nanoparticles, Chemico Kinetics Laboratory, and various research-grade experimental facilities, is a useful asset to the Department. Providing a truly multidisciplinary perspective to research, it helps expose the students to top-tier research environment at an early age, setting the stage for their future endeavors.

The undergraduate research activities of the Department also include participation in the Quarknet project, which is a High Energy Physics Education Outreach Project of Fermilab, University of Chicago, set up as a global network of physicists, teachers and students. The cosmic ray detector hosted in the Department, is linked to the Cosmic Ray e-Lab Portal at Fermilab, and provides an online environment in which students engaged in projects across the world have scientific collaboration with each other on the portal. This helps expose the students to the rudiments of Particle Physics research, Detector Physics, and Data Analysis. Each year, the students participate in the International Cosmic Ray Day through video conferencing with students from across the world.

Additionally, a large number of workshops for school and college teachers are also organized by the Department, which receive enthusiastic participation. In particular, every year, the following student enrichment programs are organized:

• Baseline test in Physics
• Visit to Inter-University Accelerator Center on the Science Day (28 February)
• National Graduate Physics Examination
• Workshops for students on Robotics, 3D Printing Techniques, Lab-view, Aero-modeling, etc.
• Seminars by eminent speakers on the frontiers of Physics

A crucial aspect of capacity building exercises is to organize enrichment workshops for the teachers, over and above similar exercises for the students. With this motivation, active learning techniques have been highly stressed on, and workshops to this line have been conducted on a regular basis. Via these platforms, the teachers are exposed to techniques for classroom engagement that aids them in developing critical thinking skills in their students.

The Department is glad that the immense efforts directed towards this end, are reflected in the overall student progression of the Department. Aside from excelling in the formal semester-end examinations conducted by the University, over the last few years, an increasing number of students have taken up internships at reputed Indian and Foreign Research Organizations including Princeton University, LIGO, Caltech, RRCAT, ISRO, HBCSE and SINP, with a significant number of students also building further on these internship opportunities and going on to join institutions renowned for cutting-edge post-graduate research.

Student Progression

Students and Research

Results

• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017

Faculty Achievements

Distinguished Alumnae

Prof. Monika Tomar

Dr. Abha Dev Habib

Dr. Bilasini Devi Naorem