Department of Physics and Astronomy

Faculty Spotlight

Laura Fields

Laura Fields, associate professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Notre Dame, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for her research studying the properties of fundamental particles called neutrinos.

Fields was among the nearly 400 researchers who were named awardees by President Joe Biden on January 14. PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government for scientists and engineers early in their careers.

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Faculty Spotlight

Nirmal Ghimire

Scientists at the University of Notre Dame synthesized a material that exhibits a rare and promising form of magnetism known as altermagnetism, which could reshape how computers store and process information in the future, a new study in Nature Communications shows.

Scientists have long sought out new methods that can support the future of ultra-fast and energy efficient electronics, said Nirmal Ghimire, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Ghimire and collaborators synthesized single crystals of a compound called called CoNb₄Se₈ that exhibits altermagnetism, according to the study.

“This is a brand-new type of magnetism, realized just within the last few years,” said Ghimire, who is affiliated with Notre Dame’s Stavropoulos Center for Complex Quantum Matter.

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Faculty Spotlight

Rebecca Surman

This year's recipient of the Thomas P. Madden Award is Prof. Rebecca Surman of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.  The award from the University of Notre Dame honors a faculty member who has demonstrated exceptional leadership in the teaching of first-year students.

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Faculty Spotlight

Mitchell Wayne

Thirty-two past and present researchers at the University of Notre Dame, including faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers, were named co-recipients of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for detailed measurements of the Standard Model of particle physics, which helps describe how the basic building blocks of matter interact.

“The Breakthrough Prize is wonderful recognition of our field of experimental high energy physics, and in some sense a validation of all the time, effort and resources that have been spent on our experiments,” said Mitchell Wayne, professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Notre Dame.

The University has played a strong role in Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The CMS and another collaboration, A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) discovered the Higgs Boson subatomic particle in 2012. The discovery allowed physics researchers to confirm the Standard Model and allowed them to start making precision measurements of its properties.

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