The School of Physics was established in 2008, originally from a small department of physics, the former Huazhong Institute of Technology, founded in 1983.
For years, through elaborate planning and unremitting persistence, the school has dedicated itself to face challenges “difficult for others, hard in the short-term, impossible for individuals”. Its staff members pioneer the spirit of “exploring the truth with innovation, striving for self-confidence and self-improvement”. With its distinctive research directions, the School of Physics has gained a great influence in China as well as abroad. The discipline of physics has been rated “A-” in the fourth national assessment of university discipline, tied for the seventh place among Chinese universities, and has been selected into the first-class under the national "Double First-Class" initiative. In 2019, the school was approved as the National First-class Undergraduate Specialty Construction Point (also known as the double ten thousand plan). In 2020, the discipline of physics was selected into Strong Foundation Program issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education.
The school now has 178 full-time academic staff members, including 81 professors and 82 associate professors, and 15 lecturers. Teachers under the age of 45 account for 75%, making it a young and energetic school. The ratio of teachers to students is 1 to 5, ensuring an outstanding academic guidance. About 30% of the teachers are national high-level talents, including 3 members of the National Academy of Science(including double-employed academicians), 3 Yangtze-Professors, 7 with a NSF Distinguished Young Scholarship, 1 selected into the Ten-thousand Talents Program, and 23 selected into the National Young-Talents Program. Since the year of 2014, more than 60 young scholars have joined the school, helping to promote the development of discipline in its rapidly uprising stage. During the past 5 years, the School of Physics was awarded more than 170 national research grants (~1.4 billion RMB), and published 39 Physical Review Letters, 4 Nature/Science, 14 Nature series, and hundreds of papers in other prestigious journals.
The school strives to be a cradle of future scientists, thereby committing to cultivate outstanding innovative talents with a broad and solid foundation of physical theories, excellent comprehensive qualities and good skills of research in the field of physics as well as in interdisciplinary fields. We offer two primary disciplines to undergraduates including Physics and Applied Physics. The college has master and doctoral's degree granting disciplines of physics(which contains theoretical physics, optics, condensed matter physics, plasma physics, radio physics, atomic and molecular physics, material physics and precision measurement and etc.). The school offers three experimental classes with an all-around guidance, in which students profit from small class sizes, and a high degree of personalization and internationalization.
The international impact of physics at HUST is quickly increasing. HUST is the unique university in the world which has three affiliated National Laboratories related to Physics: The Wuhan National Laboratory of Optoelectronics, National Pulsed High Magnetic Field Center, and the National Precise Gravitation Measurement Facility under construction led by the School of Physics. They strongly support the research of AMO, condensed matter physics, precision measurement, fundamental theoretical physics and test of fundamental physical laws, and geophysics, etc. Scientific researchers from National Precise Gravity Measurement Facility measured out the most precise Gravitational Constant G in the world, which is written into textbooks of China’s middle school and developed the first high-precision quantum gravimeter in China. it was praised as the "Gravity Center of the World" by international counterparts. Supported by 3 national scientific research platforms, we built MOE Key Laboratory of Fundamental Quantities Measurement and Hubei Key Laboratory of Gravitation and Quantum Physics. We established Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering of Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Department of Astronomy, which realized balanced and integrated development of Physics. Based on disciplines, we have established 15 research groups with each group consisting of full-time faculty members and PhD students. Every research group has a principal investigator (PI) who is responsible for the scientific research and student education of the group. The PI must be a full-time professor and has already been responsible for cultivating several graduate students with high quality. Nevertheless, the group members can be from other schools and universities overall in the world.
For further information, please read relative pages.