The mission of the Oklahoma State University Physics Department is to advance the knowledge and understanding of Physics and the physical world through nationally and internationally prominent programs of graduate and undergraduate education, research and service.

The Physics program at OSU prepares students to be competitive in a wide variety of career opportunities, ranging from science and engineering to law and business. Opportunities exist for specialization in a wide range of topics, including practical study in state-of-the-art research laboratories. The programs aim is to prepare students for useful and worthwhile careers in their specialty of choice.

The major revolutions of the 20th century have been how we understand and control the physical universe. From Einstein's Relativity blossomed modern cosmology and satellite communications, and from Schroedinger's quantum mechanics came the worlds of computers, lasers and understanding DNA. In short, Physics, as the foundation of all science, has played the pivotal role in preparing us to embark on the 21st century.

One of the primary research areas at Oklahoma State is in high energy particle physics. The aim of our research is to explain and explore Nature at her most basic level. Our current knowledge of elementary particles and their interactions (excluding gravity) is the Standard Model of particle physics. Originally developed in the 1970s, the Standard Model is one of the most extensively tested theories in physics. However, despite its success, the Standard Model cannot be the complete theory of the Universe. It does not include gravity, has no explanation for dark matter, and makes predictions that diverge at high energies. In addition, it fails to provide insight into questions like why there are three generations of fermions, why the neutrinos are so light, why the top quark is so heavy, etc... Our goal is to address these shortcomings by developing and testing well motivated extensions to the Standard Model.

Our theoretical research covers a wide range of topics: unification of the four forces of nature, neutrino masses and mixings, stability of the proton, origin of quark and lepton masses, CP violation, Z' physics, physics of compact extra dimensions, symmetry breaking, and cosmology-particle physics interface.

Our experimental program is involved in both measurements of known particles, like the top-quark, and searches for new particles, like charged Higgs bosons, additional quarks, or leptoquarks. Our research is carried out using the ATLAS detector at CERN (and previously the DO̸ (DZero) experiment at Fermilab). Our group has been involved in the construction of the optical readout of the IBL upgraded to the ATLAS Pixel system and the upgrade to the online monitoring software for the ATLAS Pixel system. We are also involved in the development and calibration of the b-tagging algorithms and studies of jet substructure with the ATLAS experiment.