Participating Faculty

The Physics Department has twenty faculty members involved in multiple disciplines including those highlighted below. Potential mentors in our program are also listed below with links to their group research pages.

Experimental High Energy Physics (Alexander Khanov, Flera Rizatdinova, and Joseph Haley)– Our group is involved in searches for new particles and forces using the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). REU participants in the eHEP group will be involved in searches for new physics (W′ bosons, vector-like quarks, and gluinos), the development of heavy quark identification (top and bottom quarks), and upgrade of the ATLAS tracking system. Participants working in eHEP will attend a series of lectures on particle physics during the first two weeks of the program.

Theoretical High Energy Physics (K. S. Babu, Dorival Gonçalves and Ahmed Ismail)– Our group studies the fundamental constituents of matter, with interests spanning various aspects of physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. Well-motivated undergraduates can learn and make meaningful contributions in this field. Specifically, the HEP theory group will involve students in understanding the pattern of fermion masses and mixings observed in nature, as well as in applying machine learning to collider searches for new physics.

Experimental Atomic Physics and Quantum Information Science (Yingmei Liu)– OSU has a strong experimental Atomic Physics program that encompasses Quantum Information Science.

Optics (Al Rosenberger and Donna K. Bandy)– The OSU Optics research program has also been part of the multidisciplinary program in Photonics. The expertise of the two optics groups complement each other: an experimental optics lab that performs pioneering studies of microresonators and a theory group that has extensively studied nonlinear optical effects. REU participants interested in experimental optics will obtain the basic optics lab skills for working with lasers and fiber optics. REU participants interested in theoretical optics will be trained in steady-state and linear-stability analyses, investigate nonlinear dynamic systems including chaos and bistability, and work with non-autonomous optical systems.

Theoretical Photonics and Quantum Information Science (Mayukh Lahiri)– The Lahiri group focuses on fundamental research in quantum optics and applications to quantum information science and imaging. REU participants will be trained in basic theoretical tools of quantum optics. The participants will also have the opportunity to participate in a research project.

Experimental Condensed Matter Physics and Optoelectronics (David McIlroy, Derek Meyers and Andrew Yost)– REU students in Dr. McIlroy’s laboratory will have the opportunity to work on two experimental condensed matter physics projects. One of the projects is to study how information temporally and spatially propagates across a network of 1D nanostructures. We are attempting to create a system that mimics the interconnectedness of neurons in the brain. The second project is in the field of surface plasmon polaritons (SPP), a quasiparticle that exists in metals, that you can envision as an entanglement of an electromagnetic wave and electron charge density wave. We are using SPP to manipulate the state of electrons in semiconductors. The Meyer's group focuses on realizing novel phases of matter through atomic layer engineering. They achieve this precision by utilizing pulsed laser deposition to deposit single layers of materials on single crystal substrates. This allows unique stacking patterns to be obtained leading to emergent phases unavailable in bulk materials. REU students in Dr. Yost's laboratory can work in projects related to optical and magnetic properties of quantum dots. The quantum dots will be either semiconducting chalcogenide quantum dots and/or magnetic cobalt quantum dots. Participants would synthesize the materials and fabricate working devices. Another project in the Yost group is to use 2D materials to fabricate phototransistor. Participants will be making spectrometers to characterize the transistors (building a MOKE, or building a polarized photo spectrometer for phototransistor measurement).

Computational Condensed Matter Physics and Quantum Information Science Mario F. Borunda)– REU students in the Borunda group will focus in developing and applying first-principles electronic structure methods to study transport in low-dimensional materials and quantum transport studies towards realizing quantum information devices in solid state systems. REU participants in the group will be performing time dependent calculation of quantum states using available codes (Octopus and in-house codes) to optimize the transport of charge towards the control of charge and spin currents. Borunda has developed a series of lectures on computational quantum mechanics which their mentored participants will attend for the first weeks of the program. The participants will also learn how to analyze and present data using python.