• The New Graduate Programs in Physics
• The Graduate Faculty
• The Ph.D. Program in Physics
• The M.S. Program in Physics
• Graduate Course Descriptions

The New Graduate Programs in Physics

We are pleased to announce new Graduate Programs offering the Master of Science (M.S.) and Ph.D. Degrees in Physics. These Programs started operations in the Fall 2005.

A unique characteristic of these Graduate Programs is that they are offered by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UTSA in collaboration with the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). This partnership between a public university and a private, nonprofit institute is the first of its kind in Texas and promises to attract nationwide attention and serve as a model for similar collaborations at other campuses in the University of Texas System. The Programs are designed to prepare graduates to make significant contributions to the evolution of space science and space technologies, biophysics, cosmology, the nation's biomedical infrastructure and the rapidly advancing scientific and technological capabilities in San Antonio, the state of Texas, and the nation.

More specifically, selected scientists from the Space Science and Engineering Division at SwRI have been appointed as Adjoint Professors (not to be confused with Adjunct Professors), at the Full, Associate, or Assistant levels, in the Physics and Astronomy Department at UTSA, with all the rights and privileges of regular Graduate Faculty, except tenure. They teach advanced graduate courses, serve in committees, supervise Ph.D. dissertations, etc. Graduate students working with SwRI scientists can receive Research Assistantships and carry out cutting-edge research in SwRI's world-class laboratories in space physics and engineering, sponsored by NASA, NSF, and other agencies.

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is a leading, independent, nonprofit applied research and development organization. It has a staff of 2,800 and occupies 1,200 acres in San Antonio, Texas. The Institute provides nearly two million square feet of laboratories, test facilities, workshops, and offices. SwRI's total revenue for fiscal year 2004 was $399 million. For more information about SwRI, please check their web site at http://www.swri.org/. SwRI's world-renowned Space Science and Engineering Division carries out design and development of scientific payloads aboard satellites, advanced spaceborne instrumentation, analysis and interpretation of returned space data, and theoretical studies of space physics. Areas of expertise include space weather; ionosphere-thermosphere-mesospheric physics; plasmaspheric physics; magnetospheric physics; heliospheric physics; cometary and planetary science; space physics instrumentation, and computational space physics.

Graduate students working toward the M.S. or Ph.D. degrees can also choose among many other areas of specialization in experimental and theoretical physics, such as condensed matter physics and advanced materials physics, biophysics, laser spectroscopy, theoretical particle physics and cosmology, mathematical physics, and computational physics. Like the rest of the university, the Department is undergoing very rapid growth, having doubled in size in terms of students and faculty during the last three years. New faculty searches are underway and more will be carried out in the near future.
 

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Graduate Faculty

The Graduate Faculty in the Department of Physics and Astronomy is comprised of the following professors (as of fall of 2005):

• Daniel Boice
  Ph.D., New Mexico State University, 1985
  Adjoint Associate Professor. (SwRI Principal Scientist.)
  Astronomy, Cometary Physics, Theoretical and Computational Space Physics.
• Lorenzo Brancaleon
  Ph.D., University of Parma, Italy, 1996
  Assistant Professor
  Experimental Molecular Biophysics, Biophotonics
• Andrey A. Chabanov
  Ph.D., Queens College, City University of New York, 2002
  Assistant Professor
  Experimental Nanophysics, Photonics, Advanced Materials
• Chonglin Chen
  Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, 1994
  Associate Professor
  Experimental Solid State Physics, Advanced Materials
• Liao Y. Chen
  Ph.D., Institute of Theoretical Physics, Academia Sinica, Beijing, 1988
  Professor
  Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Chemical Physics
• Geoffrey Crowley
  Ph.D., University of Leicester (UK), 1985
  Adjoint Professor. (ASTRA)
  Ionospheric Physics, Space Physics.
• Mihir I. Desai
  Adjoint Associate Professor (SwRI – Principal Scientist.)
  Experimental Space Physics and Space Flight Instrumentation
• Jerry Goldstein
  Ph.D., Dartmouth College, 2000
  Adjoint Assistant Professor. (SwRI Research Scientist.)
  Plasmaspheric and Magnetospheric Physics, Space Physics
• Jorg-Micha Jahn
  Ph.D., Dartmouth College, 1997
  Adjoint Assistant Professor. (SwRI Senior Research Scientist.)
  Magnetospheric Physics, Space Physics
• Zlatko Koinov
  Ph.D., St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University, Russia
  Assistant Professor
  Theoretical Solid State Physics, Optical Properties of Semiconductors
• Rafael López-Mobilia
  Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1995
  Assistant Professor
  Theoretical Particle Physics, Cosmology
• David McComas
  Ph.D., University of California at Los Angeles, 1986
  Adjoint Professor. (SwRI Senior Executive Director.)
  Heliospheric and Magnetospheric Physics, Experimental Space Physics
• Patrick L. Nash
  Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1981
  Professor
  Theoretical, Mathematical and Computational Physics
• Craig Pollock
  Ph.D., University of New Hampshire, 1987
  Adjoint Professor. (SwRI Staff Scientist.)
  Magnetospheric Physics, Experimental Space Physics.
• Dhiraj Sardar
  Ph.D., Oklahoma State University, 1980
  Professor
  Lasers, Modern Optics, Spectroscopy
• Eric M. Schlegel
  Ph.D., Indiana University, 1983
  Associate Professor
  Observational Astronomy, X-ray Astrophysics.
• Philip Valek
  Ph.D., Auburn University
  Adjoint Assistant Professor. (SwRI Research Scientist.)
  Magnetospheric Physics, Experimental Space Physics

Further searches will be conducted to expand the number of research faculty and support staff. Additional facilities, such as laboratories and office space for faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students, will also become available in the new BSEII building, currently in the design stage.
In addition to the graduate faculty, the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UTSA presently employs several non-tenure-track faculty, most of them with Ph.D.’s, and some of whom are actively engaged in research. These instructors indirectly complement the graduate programs with their expertise in various fields.
 

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The Ph.D. Program

The Ph.D. in Physics program offers students the opportunity to pursue research in a variety of basic physics fields such as condensed matter physics; chemical physics; biophysics; biophotonics; non-ionizing radiation physics; scanning tunneling, small angle X-ray and neutron scattering microscopy; theoretical particle physics; cosmology; mathematical, computational physics; semiconductor nanostructures; experimental laser spectroscopy; laser-tissue interactions; plasma physics; radiative transfer. If students choose to work with the core scientists from the Southwest Research Institute Space Science and Engineering Division, opportunities are available in the fields of space weather; ionosphere-thermosphere-mesospheric physics; plasmaspheric physics; magnetospheric physics; heliospheric physics, cometary physics; space physics instrumentation, and computational space physics.

Doctoral students must obtain a minimum of 81 graduate semester credit hours beyond the bachelor’s degree. At the end of the second year, each student takes a qualifying examination and, upon passing, submits a research proposal under the guidance of the dissertation advisor. Four or five years of full-time study are generally necessary to complete the program.

Facilities
Laser-spectroscopy, molecular biophysics, and biophotonics research laboratories are available on the UTSA campus, with research laboratories in the areas of biopolymers, nano-biophotonics, nanobiomaterials, ultrafast spectroscopy, and polymer physics. A cluster mini-supercomputer with 32, 2.8-GHz Xeon CPUs, is available for computational physics research in condensed matter, cosmology, particle physics, and other areas. The Southwest Research Institute Space Science and Engineering Division has research laboratories available in the areas of space weather; ionosphere-thermosphere-mesospheric physics; plasmaspheric physics; magnetospheric physics; heliospheric physics; cometary physics; space physics instrumentation, and computational space physics.

Admission and Assistantships
Applications are completed online through UTSA’s Graduate School’s website at: http://utsa.edu/graduate/ . Supporting documentation must include three letters of recommendation, CV or Resumé, statement of research interests, all official transcripts, GRE scores, as well as the completed application. The GRE General Test scores are required, while the Physics subject GRE scores are highly recommended.
Doctoral students may, on a competitive basis, receive up to $19,000 of support in the form of a research stipend or teaching assistantship in addition to support for all tuition and fees. For more information, please contact the

Graduate Advisor of Record
Department of Physics & Astronomy
The University of Texas at San Antonio
6900 North Loop 1604 West
San Antonio, TX 78249-0698
Phone: (210)-458-5451
Fax: (210)-458-4919

Ph.D. Degree requirements

All candidates for the Ph.D. degree in Physics will have to satisfy the university-wide masters and doctoral requirements. In addition to this, the candidate must meet the following requirements.
 
To qualify for the Ph.D. degree in Physics, the candidate will be required to take 45 semester credit hours of formal graduate course work (exclusive of coursework or other study required to remove deficiencies), 9 semester credit hours of Directed Research and Research Seminar, and 27 semester credit hours of Doctoral Research and Dissertation. The distribution of the 81 semester credit hours will be as follows:
 
Courses:          15 courses for a total of 45 semester credit hours.
Research:         36 semester credit hours.
 

Advancement to Candidacy. On completion of the core courses with a grade-point average of B (3.0), the student must demonstrate satisfactory performance on the doctoral Qualifying Examination for Admission to Candidacy. In particular, the student must present a seminar on a proposed research topic, which is followed by an oral examination. The Qualifying Examination will be administered before the student commences doctoral research.
 
Qualifying Examination. The qualifying examination is divided into written and oral portions.
 
Written Portion of the Qualifying Examination. (Under revision.)
 
Oral Portion of the Qualifying Examination. (Under revision.)
 
In the event that the student does not qualify for candidacy, the student will be considered for a terminal Master of Science Degree in Physics upon completion of requirements for the M.S. degree. 
 
After passing the Qualifying Examination the student prepares a "program of work" for the Ph.D. degree. This program of work lists the courses the student has completed and those that will be taken to satisfy the requirements for the Ph.D. The program of work must be approved by the Program Director, the Department Chair of the Physics & Astronomy Department, and by the Dean of Graduate Studies. The doctoral student, in consultation with the Graduate Program Committee, will then select a Supervising Professor and will submit a Dissertation Proposal, which must be approved by the Graduate Program Committee.  Upon approval of the Dissertation Proposal, the student formally becomes a Ph.D. candidate, and must assemble a Dissertation Committee. The student may then be allowed to engage in doctoral research. The Supervising Professor will serve as the Chair of the student’s Dissertation Committee, and will direct the student’s work at all future stages. The 36 hours of formal course work beyond the core material will be chosen in consultation with the student’s Supervising Professor.
           
A Dissertation based on original research will be prepared by the candidate.  At the discretion of the candidate’s Supervising Professor, this work must be submitted to, and/or published in, high impact journals.   This work is expected to make a significant contribution to scientific knowledge. The final written version of the Dissertation may be comprised of a compilation of published or submitted journal articles with introduction and conclusion sections.  The Dissertation Committee must approve the Dissertation by majority vote. Immediately afterwards, the candidate will present an oral defense of the Dissertation before his/her Dissertation Committee.
 
Courses for Ph.D. program
 

Note: "SCH" denotes "Semester Credit Hours"

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The M.S. Program

The Masters of Science in Physics offers students the opportunity to pursue graduate coursework in a variety of basic Physics fields such as mechanics: classical, quantum, statistical and fluid; electrodynamics; biophysics; plasma physics and magnetohydrodynamics; solid state physics; optics: nonlinear, biophotonics, and lasers; mathematical and computational physics. Students will have opportunities to choose Special Topics courses taught by the UTSA Physics faculty and core scientists from the Southwest Research Institute Space Science and Engineering Division, covering various topics in the fields of biophysics and biomedical physics; space physics and astrophysics to include heliospheric physics, magnetospheric physics, planetary science, computational fluid dynamics, cosmology, and space weather. Other special topics courses will include theoretical physics to include general relativity, cosmology, advanced condensed matter physics, quantum field theory and particle physics.

Masters students must obtain a minimum of 30 graduate semester credit hours beyond the bachelor’s degree. At the end of the second year, each student takes a comprehensive examination and, upon passing, will receive the M.S. Degree. There is no thesis option for the M.S. degree in Physics at this time.

Admisssion
Candidates are strongly encouraged to submit their applications for admission for the Fall semester, along with all supporting documentation, at the earliest possible date. Applications may be obtained online from UTSA’s Graduate School’s website at: http://www.utsa.edu/graduate/FutureStudentsAcademicPrograms/programs.cfm.
Supporting documentation must include three letters of recommendation, CV or Resumé, statement of research interests, all official transcripts, as well as the completed application.

Assistantships
Masters students will be considered for teaching assistantships to help defray costs of tuition.

For more information, please contact the

Graduate Advisor of Record
Department of Physics & Astronomy
The University of Texas at San Antonio
6900 North Loop 1604 West
San Antonio, TX 78249-0698
Phone: (210)-458-5451
Fax: (210)-458-4919

M.S. Degree requirements

All candidates for the M.S. degree in Physics must satisfy the university-wide master’s degree requirements. To qualify for the M.S. degree in Physics, the M.S. candidate is required to take 30 semester credit hours in coursework approved by the Graduate Program Committee (exclusive of coursework or other study required to remove deficiencies).
 
A candidate for the master’s degree must, in addition to other requirements, pass a comprehensive examination comprised of oral and written components. The comprehensive examination will be administered by the Graduate Program Committee. Presently there is no Thesis option for the Master of Science degree in Physics.  The Thesis option will be implemented at a later date.
 
No-thesis Option
 
For a master’s degree under the No-thesis Option, a student can meet requirements without writing a thesis. Instead, the student is required to complete 30 Semester credit hours of formal graduate coursework approved by the Graduate Program Committee as prescribed in the previous table.
 

Courses for M.S. Program (No Thesis)                                              

Note: "SCH" denotes "Semester Credit Hours"

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Graduate Course Descriptions

5103 Classical Mechanics I (Core course)
(3 0) 3 hours credit. Prerequisite: Graduate standing, or consent of instructor.
Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian formulations. Orbital Dynamics, Symmetries, and conservation laws. Relativistic dynamics.

5203 Electrodynamics I (Core course)
(3 0) 3 hours credit. Prerequisite: Graduate standing, or consent of instructor.
Electrostatics and magnetostatics; boundary value problems, Maxwell's equations; plane waves; wave guides diffraction; multipole radiation.

5303 Statistical Mechanics (Core course)
(3 0) 3 hours credit. Prerequisite: Graduate standing, or consent of instructor.
Thermodynamics, Equilibrium statistical mechanics, Boltzmann equation and the collision operator, moments of the Boltzmann equations, the Navier Stokes equations, introduction to nonequilibrium concepts, ensembles, classical and quantum gases, statistical physics of solids.

6003 Quantum Mechanics I
(3 0) 3 hours credit. Prerequisite: Graduate standing, or consent of instructor.
Postulates. Hilbert space formulation. The Schrödinger equation and one-dimensional problems. The hydrogen atom. Symmetries. Rotational invariance and angular momentum. Spin. System with N-degrees of freedom.

6103 Classical Mechanics II
(3 0) 3 hours credit. Prerequisite: Graduate standing, PHY 5103, or consent of instructor.
Hamilton-Jacobi theory, continuous media, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, instabilities, pattern formation. The three-body problem. Dust, planets, and planetary systems.

6113 Fluid Mechanics
(3 0) 3 hours credit. Prerequisite: Graduate standing, PHY 5103 and 5503, or consent of instructor.
Ideal fluids, viscous flow, turbulence, sound propagation, shock waves, Rankine-Hugoniot Relations.

6123 Plasma Physics and Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD)
(3 0) 3 hours credit. Prerequisite: Graduate standing, PHY 5103, PHY 5503, and PHY 5203, or