The Department, located in Knudsen Hall and Math Science, offers a comprehensive graduate program beginning with formal courses and seminars, and for the advanced student, individual studies and research directed by members of the faculty. The Department has approximately 150 graduate and 200 undergraduate students.

In addition to theoretical and experimental work at UCLA, there are currently research opportunities for advanced graduate students at national and international intermediate and high energy laboratories, such as those at Stanford, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Los Alamos, CERN, TRIUMF, Saclay, and Tokyo. The main off-campus astronomy facilities are Lick Observatory and the Keck Observatory. Graduate students have also used the national observatories (Kitt Peak, TRIO, NRAO OVRO, CSO) and satellites (e.g., IUE) to obtain data. The PhD degree is offered for theoretical or experimental work in the following subfields: Elementary Particle & High Energy Physics, Nuclear & Intermediate Energy Physics, Low Temperature Physics & Acoustics, Plasma Physics, Accelerator Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, Mathematical Physics, Geophysics, Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Biophysics. Among our full-time professors are six members of the National Academy of Sciences. The faculty are assisted by a staff of approximately 70 graduate students who work as Teaching Assistants. In addition to teaching, the faculty is engaged in original research in collaboration with PhD graduate students. If you would like to receive a copy of our brochure which describes current research by faculty, please write the Graduate Affairs Office, UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy (see Useful Addresses). The Department occupies Knudsen Hall and the eighth floor of Math Science which house conference rooms, faculty and staff offices, and research laboratories. Kinsey Hall was one of the four original buildings built on the Westwood campus in 1929; it contains additional classrooms, machine and electronic shops, and our undergraduate teaching laboratories.

The UCLA Library, ranked among the top five research libraries in the US, is a campus wide network of libraries serving the university's programs of study and research needs. Within this network, the Science & Engineering Library (http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/sel/) is the primary resource for the scholarly and research needs of the faculty, staff, and students in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. The Science & Engineering Library (SEL) is comprised of a main site, the SEL/EMS Collections (which includes the mathematics and astronomy collections) and the three satellite collections, SEL/Chemistry, SEL/Geology/Geophysics, and SEL/Physics (which houses core physics materials). In addition to the traditional print resources available in the campus libraries, the UCLA Library provides access to numerous electronic resources (http://www.library.ucla.edu/etext/sciences/index.htm) including full-text electronic journals, indexing and abstracting databases, and reference works. While some of these have been licensed at the local level, many have been made available through cooperation with the California Digital Library (CDL) (http://www.cdlib.org), a collaborative effort of the UC campuses housed at the University of California Office of the President. Resources available via CDL include the Melvyl Union database; CDL hosted databases such as Current Contents and INSPEC which link to the UC holdings and/or full text; finding aids to archival collections; and other databases such as Web Of Science, the ISI online version of Science Citation Index and citation indexes for other disciplines. The UCLA Library also provides interlibrary loan service to faculty, staff and students; individual research consultations; and classroom instruction. For additional information or assistance with a specific research question, please contact Elaine Adams, the librarian for physics and astronomy.

The Computer & Network Services (CNS) operates a local-area computer network which connects more than 400 work-stations within the department. The Physics Instruction Computer Laboratory (PICL) is open 24 hours a day. PICL houses fifteen high-end Unix workstations with sophisticated software applications. It also houses 8 PC's which can run NT or Linux. PICL-B houses 16 PC's to support physics lower division labs. The Physics Department's collection of software packages can serve the most vigorous needs of teaching and research activities, and spans a wide range of application areas, including desktop publishing, symbolic mathematical analysis, numerical calculation, graphics, and others. With distributed computer technology, CNS provides every member of the department's community a uniform, convenient computing environment, regardless of the type of computer used for access or the login location. The uniform InterNet Email address enables all users to communicate electronically around the world. CNS is committed to remaining on the cutting edge of technology to support teaching, research, and administration within the Physics Department.

The Astronomy division operates its own local area network, which is connected to the Internet through the campus backbone at very high speed (OC-3 to OC-12). The hardware includes 36 Sun SPARC and Ultra workstations, 4 DECstations (also running UNIX), a 1 DEC VAX and 1 DEC Alpha (both running VMS), and over 30 personal computers (most running Windows, several Linux, and a few MacOS), plus 7 public and 2 private networked printers (and several more connected directly to PCs), 3 scanners, a slide maker, as well as a large number of removable disk/tape drives of various kinds. The division also maintains its own 8-line dialin modem bank which offers terminal access as well as SLIP, CSLIP, and PPP services, and which comes in addition to the large campus-wide dialin network. Several software packages associated with astronomical data reduction and analysis are available; among them: AIPS,Ftools, IRAF, IDL, and SAOrd. The Astronomy division computer facilities are open to all staff, faculty, post-doctoral researchers, graduate students, and under-graduate students engaged in research activities with a faculty advisor. Limited access is also provided to their external collaborators and to undergraduate majors in Astrophysics (upon request). The computing facility is primarily oriented towards research and provides support for instructional development, electronic communication, desktop publishing, proposal development, and departmental administration.