Physics
The Department of Physics at Colorado School of Mines is dedicated to high-quality physics education for undergraduate and graduate students and advancing the world’s knowledge in the areas of condensed matter physics, optical physics, quantum physics, renewable energy physics, and subatomic physics.
Education and Research
Our faculty and students at all levels conduct more than $6 million in externally funded research every year, with many projects associated with Mines’ pioneering research centers.
Research centers with strong connections to Physics include the Mines/NREL Nexus, CyberInfrastructure and Advanced Research Computing (CIARC), the Microintegrated Optics for Advanced Bioimaging and Control Center (MOABC), and the Nuclear Science and Engineering Center (NuSEC).
Our faculty are consistently recognized for both their research and their teaching, while our graduate and undergraduate students are often the recipients of awards and grants.
Physics is also heavily involved with Mines’ interdisciplinary graduate programs in Materials Science, Nuclear Engineering, and Quantum Engineering.
Watch the following video to learn more about the varied and exciting physics research taking place at Mines.
Announcements
Announcements
Nanfang Yu
Flat Optics
Abstract: In this talk, I will share with the audience recent and on-going work in my lab on metasurfaces and biophotonics. Metasurfaces utilize strong interactions between light and nanostructured thin films to control light with subwavelength precision. I will describe how we use metasurface as a technology platform to innovate free-space optics, integrated photonics, and neuromorphic computing, with examples including holographic metasurfaces for trapping ultracold atoms, mm-wave flat-knit metasurface reflect-arrays, leaky-wave metasurfaces for interconnecting integrated and free-space optics, and metasurface-based neural networks for facial verification. I will also describe on-going work on characterizing and understanding the color and polarization vision of living butterflies.
Short-Bio: Nanfang Yu is an Associate Professor of Applied Physics at the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University. His lab conducts experimental research on metasurfaces, integrated photonics, and biophotonics. Yu was previously a Research Associate in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University from 2009 to 2012. He received the Ph.D. degree in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University in 2009, and the B.S. degree from the Department of Electronics at Peking University, Beijing, China, in 2004. Yu is the recipient of 2023 Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigators Award, 2022 OPTICA Fellow, 2017 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director’s Fellowship, 2016 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, and 2015 DARPA Young Faculty Award.
Nanfang Yu
Flat Optics
Abstract: In this talk, I will share with the audience recent and on-going work in my lab on metasurfaces and biophotonics. Metasurfaces utilize strong interactions between light and nanostructured thin films to control light with subwavelength precision. I will describe how we use metasurface as a technology platform to innovate free-space optics, integrated photonics, and neuromorphic computing, with examples including holographic metasurfaces for trapping ultracold atoms, mm-wave flat-knit metasurface reflect-arrays, leaky-wave metasurfaces for interconnecting integrated and free-space optics, and metasurface-based neural networks for facial verification. I will also describe on-going work on characterizing and understanding the color and polarization vision of living butterflies.
Short-Bio: Nanfang Yu is an Associate Professor of Applied Physics at the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University. His lab conducts experimental research on metasurfaces, integrated photonics, and biophotonics. Yu was previously a Research Associate in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University from 2009 to 2012. He received the Ph.D. degree in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University in 2009, and the B.S. degree from the Department of Electronics at Peking University, Beijing, China, in 2004. Yu is the recipient of 2023 Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigators Award, 2022 OPTICA Fellow, 2017 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director’s Fellowship, 2016 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, and 2015 DARPA Young Faculty Award.
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