In line with the Institute’s main goal of contributing to progress in the basic sciences, the Physics Department started work as the first IASBS Department with 3 faculty members in the spring of 1993 by admitting 7 students in the MSc Programme in Physics. In 1996, the Institute launched its first PhD Programme by admitting students in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Astrophysics, and Mathematical Physics. A short while later, the Master’s Programme in Experimental Optics was established.

In the year 2000, a special seamless PhD Programme was established to admit the top school leavers passing the National University Entrance Examination. After completing their undergraduate and postgraduate courses, the students in this 7-year Programme proceed directly to their PhD research project skipping the MSc dissertation. In 2018, a seamless MSc-PhD Degree Programme was also stablished in the Department.

The Physics Department has created a dynamic environment for comprehensive postgraduate education in physics and for research and discovery with purely scientific and research orientation, an environment which is unique and free of the usual distractions prevalent in other universities in the country and comparable to the educational environment of the scientific centres in the industrial countries.

The faculty members of the Physics Department are mostly young and active researchers working in various branches of theoretical and experimental physics alongside more experienced members of the Department in close contact with the students. Since its inception, more than 700 postgraduate students have completed their studies at the Department of Physics.

At present, the Physics Department has 36 faculty members and more than 360 postgraduate and Continuous-Track undergraduate students. It has a very high faculty-to-student ratio; unique among Iranian universities. Also, the Physics Department has always maintained one of the highest ratios of the “number of high quality refereed publications to faculty members” in the country.

The members of the Physics Department actively participate in international conferences and workshops and collaborate with the international scientific community. MIT, the University of Missouri, the University of Southern California, the University of Louisiana, the University of Alberta, the Collège de France, the University of Strasburg, the University of Hamburg, Wuppertal University, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), the Max-Planck Institute, and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) are among the world-class universities and research centres with which our faculty have had research collaborations over the years.