Welcome to Physics & Astronomy
The Physics & Astronomy Department, situated at the heart of North America’s Quantum Valley, Canada’s technology hub, is located an hour south-west of Toronto. Waterloo is like no other place in the world to study physics. Come to Waterloo to study quantum information, holographic landscapes, and supermassive black holes. Create exotic materials, study laser optics, and build bio-sensors. The Physics & Astronomy department is your link to the Institute of Quantum Computing and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Join our community. Study with some of the best physicists in the world.
Be inspired. Inspire us.
Come to Waterloo!
Brian McNamara, Chair
The Physics & Astronomy department encourages an inclusive, tolerant, respectful, and diverse, intellectual environment
News
- June 8, 2018The role of frequency-shifting in quantum scalability
Physicists at IQC have developed new methods for preventing leakage errors due to cavity modes, an important obstacle in building a scalable quantum computer.
- June 4, 2018Top graduate student awards announced
Every year, top graduate students from the Faculty of Science are nominated for the W.B. Pearson Medal, which is given to a Doctoral student from each department in recognition of their creative research, and the Dean of Science Award, which is given to a master’s student from each department in recognition of outstanding performance.
The Dean of Science Award in Physics & Astronomy has been won by Allison Sachs, for her exceptional work on "Entanglement Harvesting and Divergences in Unruh-DeWitt Detector Pairs", supervised by Robb Mann and Eduardo Martin-Martinez.
- May 11, 2018Canada Research Chair positions renewed for two Waterloo Physics & Astronomy faculty
Two Physics & Astronomy researchers have been reappointed as Canadian Research Chairs (CRC). Kevin Resch and Roger Melko were recognized for their continued achievement with research funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) over the next five years.
Events
- Aug. 22, 2018Discovering the outer Solar system
Astronomy Lunch Series
Estela Fernández-Valenzuela (Florida Space Institute, UCF)
- Aug. 27, 2018Synthesis of Polyynes by Femtosecond and Nanosecond Laser Interaction with Matter
M.Sc. Thesis Presentation
Candidate: Sahr Al-Tuairqi
- Sep. 4, 2018Probing the dark universe with gravitational lensing
Ph.D. Thesis Presentation
Candidate: Mansour Karami
Meet our people
Michael Hudson
On sabbatical until August 31, 2018
Broadly speaking, Professor Hudson's research is in observational and theoretical cosmology, particularly Galaxy Formation, and measuring the properties of dark matter and dark energy through Gravitational Lensing, Cosmic Flows and Large-scale Structure.
