Welcome to the Physics Department
Welcome to the PI Physics Department web pages. The Physics Department currently has six faculty members, one lab engineer, and two lab technicians. Our faculty acquired their initial research and teaching experience in either North America or Europe and most have extensive international work experience. Faculty members originate from Ghana, Iran, Morocco, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.
Our primary goal is to provide PI students with supportive but challenging university-level physics courses that are comparable to those offered at excellent universities world-wide. Our courses are designed to prepare our students for the subsequent rigorous academic work that is expected of university-trained engineers.
In all of our courses, students learn from individual study, classroom lecture and demonstrations, discussions, interactive simulations, assigned homework, and laboratory activities. The laboratory component is critical for so-called ‘hands on’ learning – the making of meaningful connections between abstract concepts and concrete experiences – and for learning ‘the scientific method’ and some basic practical experimental techniques. To achieve all this, faculty and staff work together to tightly integrate lecture and laboratory instruction.
The following are short descriptions of our courses. Example syllabi are available by clicking on the highlighted course titles:
PHYS 191 PHYSICS I – MECHANICS
This is a first university course in physics that covers the basic principles of mechanics using vectors and calculus. The fundamental concepts are presented as well as applications of kinematics and kinetics of particles and solid bodies, including Newton's Laws, energy and momentum principles, oscillations and waves.
PHYS 241 PHYSICS II - ELECTROMAGNETISM AND OPTICS
This is a second course in physics covering the basic principles of electromagnetism and physical optics. An introduction to the fundamental laws of electricity and magnetism including electric charges and fields, Gauss law, electric potential difference, electric current and resistance, capacitance, magnetic fields, Ampere's law, Biot-Savart law, inductance, Faraday's law, and Maxwell's equations are developed using the mathematical formalism of vector calculus. Applications to simple electrical circuits and simple electromagnetic devices using these fundamental laws are given. An introduction to physical optical phenomena including light as an electromagnetic wave, reflection, refraction, Snell's law, and the phenomena of polarization, interference, and diffraction are also developed.
PHYS 341 MODERN PHYSICS WITH APPLICATIONS
This course aims to instill in the student an appreciation of the concepts and methods of twentieth-century Physics, and to link this with insight into modern technological applications including lasers, light polarization techniques, radioactive dating, activation analysis, nuclear medicine, and semiconductor devices. The fundamental link between experiment and theory is stressed and discussed throughout and students will achieve a broader perspective about the empirical basis of modern Physics. Topics to be covered include the radiation and propagation of electromagnetic waves, the theory of special relativity, and the wave-particle duality of photons and 'material' particles.
Note: the background of our physics pages shows a typical image of bubble chamber particle tracks. The differences in these tracks allow the determination of the energy, charge, and mass of the particles. Such images allow physicists to witness energetic collisions and the creation of exotic particles such as positrons and neutrinos.
