Physics

The Department of Physics at Carleton offers master’s programs in particle physics and medical physics. The department is research-intensive and our degrees are thesis-based involving a research project which builds on the courses taken. Our MSc programs are linked through the Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Physics (OCIP) with the University of Ottawa, allowing both universities to offer a broad spectrum of physics programs that are complementary to each other. Programs at the University of Ottawa focus on condensed matter physics, photonics and biophysics. Learn more about Ottawa-Carleton Joint Institutes.

A collaborative Specialization in Data Science is available.

Capital Advantage

Our students benefit both research-wise and career-wise from a multitude of resources available in Canada’s capital city. The foremost of these is the network through OMPI – the Ottawa Medical Physics Institute – which enables our medical physics program to be offered in collaboration with medical physicists from leading centres including The Ottawa Hospital and its Cancer Centre, the National Research Council, Health Canada, and the University of Ottawa Heart Institute.  Students also benefit from the fact that Carleton is a member of TRIUMF, which is Canada’s national centre for particle and nuclear physics, and we are a participant in major international collaborations such as the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and neutrino physics experiments such as EXO at SNOLAB.

Fields of Specialization

• Medical Physics
• Particle Physics

Research Highlights

• Theory of elementary particles, astroparticle physics, and early universe cosmology;
• Detector instrumentation and design, physics simulation, experimental operations and data analysis on world acclaimed projects;
• Medical physics imaging: x-ray, MRI, PET, nuclear medicine, nonlinear optical and Raman spectroscopy;
• Cancer therapy and dosimetry: radiotherapy and radiobiology.