PHYSICS EDUCATION

“Leveraging the cutting-edge research platforms to breed outstanding talent” is an underlying principle of the School of Physical Sciences.

CAS embraces the majority of the state-of-the-art largescale scientific facilities in the nation such as the Beijing Electron–Positron Collider (BEPCII) and the Beijing Spectrometer (BESIII), the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment (Daya Bay), the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL), the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), and the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS). Guided by the strategy toward the “fusion of scientific research and teaching,” those facilities indeed provide the best opportunity in scientific education and research training to physics students.

 BES III, a general-purpose detector based at the BePCii e+e- collider in Beijing.

One of the Daya Bay detectors.

The curriculum for physics-related subjects is designed by the teaching and research sections. The curriculum then needs to be approved by the teaching committee of the school. The school aims to continually improve its standards of teaching, drawing upon recent developments in graduate-level education around the world. Besides having a full-time faculty, the school also leverage the extensive experience from numerous top-notch scholars in relevant fields who teach on a part-time basis. In addition, each year over a hundred experts from China and abroad come to give special lectures on advanced topics.

The school offers BD, MS and PhD degrees in physics and nuclear science & technology. The graduate program program offers degrees in almost all of the research fields of physics, such as particle and nuclear physics, atomic and molecular physics, plasma physics, condensed matter physics, acoustic physics, optics and radio physics.

It provides more than 85 core and optional courses, and more than 40 scientific symposiums and various research training programs.

In terms of undergraduate education, the mission is to “cultivate the future leaders and the backbone of science and technology.” Thus, the team of instructors for the undergraduate courses has been very carefully selected from the most distinguished faculty members. Around 80 undergraduate students majoring in physics are expected to be recruited each year. As of today, the total undergraduate major enrollment in the School of Physical Sciences is 235. Each student is assigned a supervisor, who is selected from the list of distinguished professors or full-time researchers. With 267 total faculty members, it consequently results in a faculty-student ratio of 1.1:1. Presently, the total enrollment in master’s and doctoral program are 665 and 1219, respectively.

Adhering to UCAS’s mission to “cultivate innovative, leading talent in science and technology for the future of the nation”, the School of Physics at UCAS focuses on preparing resources for the two newly approved national strategic projects: the Beijing Huairou National Scientific Center and the Shanghai Zhangjiang National Scientific Center. As the main pillar of these two mega national scientific projects, physics will be the focal point of China’s scientific research domain. As such, the School of Physics at UCAS is expected to train hundreds, if not thousands, of highly qualified, well trained young physicists in the next decades to fulfill the national’s scientific goals.