Texas Tech Department of Physics and Astronomy

10/07/2026

The 2026 Bucy Distinguished Lecture was a great success! We had a packed house last night, and it was wonderful to see such an enthusiastic turnout from our university and the broader community!

First and foremost, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to Professor Mikhail Lukin for visiting Texas Tech, generously sharing his time with our university leadership, faculty and students through several individual and group meetings, and delivering such a fascinating and inspiring public lecture. This visit was also a very special homecoming for Dr. Lukin, as Texas Tech was where he delivered the very first colloquium of his scientific career!

A special thank you to VPR&I James Reecy, Dean Tosha Dupras (A&S), Dean Roland Faller (WCOE), Associate Dean Changzhi Li (WCOE), Dr. Yong Chen (CS Chair), and Dr. Rob Duncan (PHAS) for joining a special discussion with Professor Lukin about Texas Tech's ongoing and future efforts in quantum science and technology.

And a heartfelt thank you to everyone who worked so hard behind the scenes to make this event possible. Your dedication, teamwork, and tremendous efforts made this event such a success!

Some wonderful photos from last night's event are now available on our Flickr page, link in the comments. 📸

10/06/2026

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Francis Halzen (University of Wisconsin-Madison) for his pioneering leadership in the detection of high-energy cosmic neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole.

IceCube has detected high-energy neutrinos originating from distant cosmic sources, including active galaxies powered by supermassive black holes. These discoveries have opened a new window on the universe through neutrino astronomy, allowing scientists to probe some of the most energetic astrophysical phenomena and investigate the origins of cosmic rays.

Link in comments!

10/02/2026

It was a pleasure to welcome VPR&I Reecy, A&S Dean Dupras, and A&S Associate Dean Talley to the APD Lab and CEES within the Department of Physics and Astronomy and to share some of the exciting research underway in these state-of-the-art facilities.

We greatly appreciate their time, interest, and continued support of our faculty and research programs. Many thanks to Drs. Madrid, Akchurin, and Duncan for showcasing their exciting work in next-generation particle detector technologies and fusion energy research.

We are proud of the innovative research taking place across PHAS and grateful for the opportunity to share it with our university leadership. Thank you for visiting us and for a wonderful afternoon!

09/29/2026

🚨 Introducing Physics & Astronomy's Newest Faculty Member!

✨ Dr. Debatri Chattopadhyay, Assistant Professor ✨

Dr. Debatri Chattopadhyay joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy as an assistant professor in September 2026. She is a theoretical and computational astrophysicist who studies how neutron stars and black holes form, evolve, and merge. Her work develops population models that carry a consistent set of physical assumptions from stellar and binary evolution and the dynamics of dense star clusters through to the populations we observe, including gravitational-wave mergers, radio pulsars, Gaia astrometric binaries, and electromagnetic transients such as kilonovae and short gamma-ray bursts.

Her current projects include black-hole growth from stellar to intermediate and massive scales in globular and nuclear star clusters; the mass and spin evolution of neutron stars as radio pulsars; forecasts of kilonovae and short gamma-ray bursts for upcoming surveys; and machine-learning inference for gravitational-wave populations, with predictions for LISA and next-generation detectors such as Cosmic Explorer and the Einstein Telescope. She is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and contributed to the population analysis of the latest gravitational-wave catalog.

Dr. Chattopadhyay completed her PhD at Swinburne University of Technology within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), following degrees from the University of Calcutta and IIT Kharagpur. She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at Cardiff University and Northwestern University’s CIERA.

Beyond her research, she co-authored a children’s book on women in physics and voyaged to Antarctica with the Homeward Bound leadership program. Outside astrophysics, she is a trained Manipuri (Indian classical) dancer, an avid reader of English and Bengali literature, and a traveler with a particular interest in history and archaeology.

Welcome to our physics family!!! 🎉

09/29/2026