The Department came into existence in 1958, ayear after the establishment of the University, with Professor Devendra Sharma,a renowned spectroscopist of his time, as Head of the Department. ProfessorSharma laid the foundation and led the department to flourish in amultidimensional way with daunting support from colleagues. The departmentstarted undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and developed researchfacilities in areas like Spectroscopy, Electronics, Materials Science, X-rayCrystallography, Molecular Biophysics, Astrophysics, General Relativity andCosmology. Over the years, the department earned high reputation in bothteaching and research. The Physics Department continued to grow under thedynamic leadership of Prof. N. K. Sanyal and then the Professors R.M. Misra,R.C. Maheshwari, Maheshwar Misra, H.B. Lal, J.N. Rai, C.P.D. Dwivedi, JaiPrakash, S.L. Srivastava, J.P. Chaturvedi, D.C. Srivastava, Mihir Roychoudhury,S. N. Tiwari, Hari Saran (Dean), Shantanu Rastogi and Lallan Yadav. Professor RaviShankar Singh took the charge of the Head of the Department on August 19, 2022by Prof. Lallan Yadav, who attained superannuation on Aug. 18, 2022.
The department has a dynamic teaching programmebased on NEP 2020/CBCS syllabi both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.The postgraduate curriculum is divided into four semesters with six optionalcourses in the final year. The optional courses offered are: (a) Astrophysics,(b) Biophysics, (c) Electronics, (d) Solid State Physics, (e) Spectroscopy andLasers and (f) X-rays. In addition, Diploma in Photography is also included inthe departmental Programme.
In research the department has madesignificant and notable contributions in diverse fields such as Stellar, Solarand Galactic Astrophysics, High Energy Astrophysics, Semiconductor Devices andMicroelectronics, Nano materials, Thin Film and Thick Film gas sensors, QuantumOptics and Quantum computation & communication, Photo-voltaic, Super-ionicSolids, X-ray Crystallography, Molecular Biophysics, Thermoelectric, OpticalDielectric and Magnetic Properties of Solids, Optical Spectroscopy and QuantumFields Theory etc. More than 150 students have been awarded Ph.D. degree. Thedepartment has MoU with ARIES, Nainital and collaborative programmes with IIA,Bangaluru; IUCAA, Pune; NCRA, Pune; TIFR, Mumbai; IPR, Ahmedabad and CEERI,Pilani etc. Financial supports in the form of project from almost all thenational funding agencies like DST, UGC, CSIR, BRNS, DBT, UPCST etc. have beensanctioned to the department. The department has the privilege to get sponsoredunder DST-FIST programme.
