Faculty of Physics
Welcome to the website of the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw
The Faculty of Physics is a large research and teaching center. It consists of The Institutes of Theoretical Physics, Experimental Physics, Geophysics, The Astronomical Observatory and The Department of Mathematical Methods in Physics.
The Faculty is regarded as one of the best in the country, recognized internationally for the high quality of research and education.
News
Next-Generation Quantum Communication
In the era of instant data exchange and growing risks of cyberattacks, scientists are seeking secure methods of transmitting information. One promising solution is quantum cryptography – a quantum technology that uses single photons to establish encryption keys. A team from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw has developed and tested in urban infrastructure a novel system for quantum key distribution (QKD). The system employs so-called high-dimensional encoding. The proposed setup is simpler to build and scale than existing solutions, while being based on a phenomenon known to physicists for nearly two centuries – the Talbot effect. The research results have been published in prestigious journals: “Optica Quantum”, “Optica”, and “Physical Review Applied”. | More
Jerzy Pniewski and Leopold Infeld Colloquium
The Jerzy Pniewski and Leopold Infeld Colloquium of the Faculty of Physics will be held in room 0.06 on Monday, May 26, exceptionally at 11:30 AM. The lecture entitled: "Making Sense of Modern AI " will be delivered by: prof. Michał Kosinski, Stanford University, USA | More
Gravitino, a new candidate for Dark Matter
Dark Matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in fundamental physics. Many theoretical proposals (axions, WIMPs) and 40 years of extensive experimental search failed to provide any explanation of the nature of Dark Matter. Several years ago, in a theory unifying particle physics and gravity, new, radically different Dark Matter candidates were proposed, superheavy charged gravitinos. Very recent paper in Physical Review Research by scientists from the University of Warsaw and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, shows how new underground detectors, in particular JUNO detector starting soon to take data, even though designed for neutrino physics, are also extremely well suited to eventually detect charged Dark Matter gravitinos. The simulations combining two fields, elementary particle physics and very advanced quantum chemistry, show that the gravitino signal in the detector should be unique and unambiguous. | More
Making the invisible visible: a new way to boost light emission at the nanoscale
Light still holds surprises – as demonstrated by researchers from the Ultrafast Phenomena Lab at the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, in collaboration with the Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, who have discovered a new enhancement effect in the emission of upconverting nanoparticles. They demonstrated that simultaneous excitation of these nanostructures with two near-infrared beams of laser light leads to a significant increase in emission intensity. Under carefully chosen conditions, visible emission emerges only when both beams are applied together, even though neither beam alone produces any emission at all. This discovery paves the way for visualizing infrared radiation beyond the sensitivity range of standard detectors. The findings, potentially applicable in microscopy and photonic technologies, have been published in the prestigious journal “ACS Nano”. | More
Polish physicists co-discover “lonely” spinons - a new step towards quantum technologies
Researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw and the University of British Columbia have described how a so-called lone spinon - an exotic quantum excitation that is a single unpaired spin - can arise in magnetic models. The discovery deepens our understanding of the nature of magnetism and could have implications for the development of future technologies such as quantum computers and new magnetic materials. The findings were published in the renowned journal “Physical Review Letters.”. | More
New photonic platform developed by Polish research team
A team of researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology, and the Institut Pascal at Université Clermont Auvergne has developed a novel method for using cholesteric liquid crystals in optical microcavities. The platform created by the researchers enables the formation and dynamic tuning of photonic crystals with integrated spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and controlled laser emission. The results of this groundbreaking research have been published in the renowned journal “Laser & Photonics Reviews”. | More
A drop hollows out the stone... and records the climate's history
Water reshapes the Earth through slow, powerful erosion, carving intricate landscapes like caves and pinnacles in soluble rocks such as limestone. An international team from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the University of Florida, and the Institute of Earth Sciences in Orléans has discovered that vertical channels, known as karstic solution pipes, preserve a record of Earth’s climatic history. Their study, published in Physical Review Letters, reveals that these pipes evolve with time into an invariant shape, a fixed, ideal form that remains unchanged as the pipes deepen, encoding ancient rainfall patterns. | More
Quantum control of collisions beyond ultralow temperatures
At ultracold temperatures, interatomic collisions are relatively simple, and their outcome can be controlled using a magnetic field. However, research by scientists led by Prof. Michal Tomza from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw and prof. Roee Ozeri from the Weizmann Institute of Science shows that this is also possible at higher temperatures. The scientists published their observations in the scientific journal “Science Advances”. | More
From classical hydrodynamics to quantum hydrodynamics and back again – how the Navier-Stokes equations describe quantum systems
Although the Navier-Stokes equations are the foundation of modern hydrodynamics, adopting them to quantum systems has so far been a major challenge. Researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, Maciej Łebek, M.Sc. and Miłosz Panfil, Ph.D., Prof. UW, have shown that these equations can be generalised to quantum systems, specifically quantum liquids in which the motion of particles is restricted to one dimension. This discovery opens up new avenues for research into transport in one-dimensional quantum systems. The paper, published in the prestigious Physical Review Letters, was awarded an ‘editors’ suggestion'. | More
A new class of cosmic X-ray sources discovered
An international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw, have identified a new class of cosmic X-ray sources. The findings have been published in „Astrophysical Journal Letters”. | More
Upcoming events
2025-10-06 (09:30) :: PhD Thesis
Complexity, holography and geometry / Złożoność, holografia i geometria
2025-10-06 (11:30) :: J.Pniewski & L.Infeld Colloquium
Making Sense of Modern AI
2025-10-06 (14:15) :: String Theory Journal Club
Insights into the microscopics of holographic complexity
2025-10-08 (15:15) :: Biological Physics and Bioinformatics Seminar
Neural network-assisted first-principles exploration on the conformational space of peptides and saccharides
2025-10-09 (10:15) :: Nuclear Physics Seminar
Forward Collider Neutrinos and Implications for Hadronic Physics
2025-10-09 (10:15) :: Optics Seminar
Three-dimensional Bose-Fermi droplets at nonzero temperatures
2025-10-09 (10:15) :: "Theory of Duality" (KMMF) Seminar
Conveyor belt for quantum information
2025-10-09 (11:15) :: Joint Seminar on Quantum Information and Technologies
Quantum light sources: entanglement generation and characterization
2025-10-09 (12:15) :: Seminar "Theory of Particle Physics and Cosmology"
The bubble wall velocity in cosmological phase transitions
2025-10-09 (12:15) :: Photonics Seminar
High-Resolution Single-Pixel Imaging in the Near- and Mid-Infrared Range
Research Highlights
João Pedro Mendonça, Krzysztof Jachymski, and Yao Wang
Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 133601 (2025)
DOI:10.1103/z8gv-7yyk
Stanisław Kurdziałek, Francesco Albarelli and Rafał Demkowicz-Dobrzański
Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 130801
DOI:10.1103/jy3v-wkcb
Z. Ogorzałek, C.-C. Lee, J. Z. Domagala, W. Zajkowska-Pietrzak, S. Kret, R. Bożek, W. Pacuski, I. Lutsyk, W. Ryś, P. J. Kowalczyk, M. Tokarczyk, M. Polakowski, D. Wasik, J. Sadowski, B.-H. Huang, H. Lin, M. Gryglas-Borysiewicz
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 2025
DOI/10.1021/acsami.5c04474
P. Rajchel-Mieldzioć, A. Bednarkiewicz, K. Prorok, P. Fita
ACS Nano 2025, 19, 29, 26932–26941
DOI/10.1021/acsnano.5c08510
Łucja Kipczak, Zhaolong Chen, Magdalena Grzeszczyk, Sergey Grebenchuk, Pengru Huang, Kristina Vaklinova, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Adam Babiński, Maciej Koperski, Maciej R. Molas
Nanoscale Horizons, Advance Article (2025)
DOI:10.1039/D5NH00198F
