Physics BSc (Hons) / MPhys (Hons)

Professor Daniel Thomas:

What really fascinates me most about university education is that right at the interface between research and teaching, newly created knowledge and skills are passed on directly to you, to the next generation.

The University of Portsmouth gives us the right equipment and the right facilities to our physics students and to our physics staff to do exactly that.

Our physics students get to experience the laws of nature and physical concept first hand, to the lab modules in the first and second years. Cherie Morrison, our senior technician, will show you now a little bit of the experiments you are going to be doing in the first and the second year of your studies.

Cherie Morrison (Senior Technician):

This is the main physics room where we have our first and second year experiments. Behind me you can see the photoelectric effect, electron diffraction, hall effect.

We also have an experiment using LabView that will give you the skills that employers are looking for.

Here's the AFM that stands for atomic force microscopy. Here we can look at the topography of the surface. So that's what the surface looks like and how it has all these bumps and ridges but really, these features are only a few nanometres tall. You can see an image of my hair. My hair is only roughly 100 microns thick and this image is only 10 microns across. You can see all the scales, all the bumps and all the shapes on my hair.

Professor Daniel Thomas:

In our labs we've also got the MBE, which stands for Molecular Beam Epitexi and the plasma spluttering device. They are both high end cutting edge research devices that we use, in fact, for our research but we also use it for our teaching.

What we do with these devices is we are adding very thin films on surfaces and the thickness of this film is less than a nanometre. Think about it, less than a nanometre. It's just the size of an atom. So the device creates a vacuum less than deep space, 10 to the minus 10 million.

Doctor Samantha Penny:

This is our computer lab for our final year students to carry out their project work. So if you come and do an MPhys year with us, so you do the four year integrated master's degree, you get a chance to carry out a final year project. We have this lovely, dedicated computer room for you to do your project work in, so no competing with the other undergrads for your computer space.

In that project, you'll get to carry out all sorts of real research problems that real life astronomers or physicists are working on. So, for example, the kind of projects I'm offering this year, my students will be working with observational data sets from large cutting edge astronomical surveys.

They're going to be searching for supermassive black holes and galaxies. They're going to be working out why galaxies in really, really under dense, really sort of uncrowded regions of the universe, why they look different to galaxies in other parts of the universe as well.

And I'm also having a student who's going to look at how to communicate astronomy to anybody with a visual impairment. So a real range of projects you could get involved with if you come to Portsmouth. So we look forward to welcoming you to the University of Portsmouth and I think you'll really enjoy your time here studying with us.

Professor Daniel Thomas:

The offices of our physics staff are located in the Dennis Sciama building right next to the labs. The Dennis Sciama Building also hosts the well renowned Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation that is well known for its world leading research in astrophysics and cosmology. When you study physics with us, you get the opportunity to work on exciting research projects together with our staff from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation in fields like astrophysics and cosmology.

Close to the Dennis Sciama Building and the labs is the Lion Gate Building, where we host the Technology and Learning Centre. That's a space for our physics students to meet, to learn or just to hang out. We also hold daily tutorials run by our mathematics and physics staff for our physics students so that they can ask any questions they may have about maths or physics.

We look forward to welcoming you at the University of Portsmouth to discover the magic of physics with us.