Condensed Matter
  & Biological Physics

Condensed Matter Physics is the science of connecting atomic-scale physics to the properties of everyday things. When you put a lot of atoms together you can get strange, wonderful and sometimes useful new kinds of behavior: superconductivity, magnetism, rubber elasticity, superfluidity. One of the great surprises about matter is that as it becomes more complex, it develops new, often unexpected properties.  The rigid crystallinity of a snowflake, the levitation of superconductors, the formation and stability of cells in organisms, are each examples of properties that emerge from correlations amongst the basic building blocks of matter.  The understanding of such "correlated matter'' has strong bearing on the development of new materials, but it also continues to shed light on fundamental physics, and is a topic of great current interest in condensed matter physics.

Condensed matter research at Syracuse spans both "hard" and "soft" condensed matter physics.  "Hard" matter refers to matter governed by atomic forces and quantum mechanics. It is generally not biological, and involves crystals, glasses, metals, semiconductors and oxides.   "Soft" matter refers to the myriad varieties of matter that form on the macroscopic scale, often from biological, or organic molecules.  Here the large-scale physics, though collective, does not involve quantum mechanics, and the materials of interest are literally "softer". 

Condensed matter research is highly interdisciplinary and much of the growth of the field in recent decades has occurred at the boundaries between physics, chemistry materials science, biology and computer science. The condensed matter faculty at Syracuse has led this trend, as reflected by the program of the semiannual New York Complex Matter Workshop jointly organized with Cornell and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Students interested in research at the boundary between fundamental and more applied science can find opportunities for collaborative efforts with the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute, as well as with the Upstate Medical School and the SUNY School of Environmental Science and Forestry. State of the art laboratory facilities include the Syracuse University Surface Imaging Laboratory (SUSIL). Finally, Syracuse is a branch of I2CAM, the International Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter, that offers many opportunities for national and international collaborative exchanges of both junior and senior scientists.

The department currently has six experimentalists and five theorists pursuing research in condensed matter and biological physics. More details about the research carried out in each group can be found at the individual web pages.