The Blackett Laboratory is part of the

Imperial College Faculty of Natural Sciences The Faculty of Natural Sciences is one of the three main faculties of Imperial College London in London, England. It was formed in 2001 from the former Royal College of Science, a constituent college of Imperial College which dated back to 1848 ...

and has housed the Department of Physics at Imperial College London since its completion in 1961. Named after experimental physicist

Patrick Blackett Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, Baron Blackett (18 November 1897 – 13 July 1974) was a British experimental physicist known for his work on cloud chambers, cosmic rays, and paleomagnetism, winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1948. ...

who established a laboratory at the college, the building is located on the corner of Prince Consort Road and

Queen's Gate Queen's Gate is a street in South Kensington, London, England. It runs south from Kensington Gardens' Queen's Gate (the edge of which gardens are here followed by Kensington Road) to Old Brompton Road, intersecting Cromwell Road. The street ...

Kensington Kensington is a district in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in the West of Central London. The district's commercial heart is Kensington High Street, running on an east–west axis. The north-east is taken up by Kensington Garden ...

. The department ranks 11th on QS's 2018 world university rankings.

History

The Department of Physics at Imperial College dates back to the physics department of the Normal School of Science, later the

Royal College of Science The Royal College of Science was a higher education institution located in South Kensington; it was a constituent college of Imperial College London from 1907 until it was wholly absorbed by Imperial in 2002. Still to this day, graduates from th ...

. As part of the formation of Imperial, the Royal College was moved into a new building at South Kensington in 1906, which also housed the Chemistry Department. From 1906 to 1932 the head of the Physics Department was Prof. H. L. Callender, famous for his work on the properties of steam. G P Thomson (son of

J J Thomson Sir Joseph John Thomson (18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) was a British physicist and Nobel Laureate in Physics, credited with the discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be discovered. In 1897, Thomson showed that ...

) replaced Callender in 1932, and worked in part on nuclear physics and atomic weaponry. He was followed P. M. S. Blackett as head in around 1953, with the construction of the new Physics building starting at about the same time. Blackett refocused efforts from low-energy physics to high-energy nuclear physics, and under him research started into cosmic rays and the use of

bubble chamber A bubble chamber is a vessel filled with a superheated transparent liquid (most often liquid hydrogen) used to detect electrically charged particles moving through it. It was invented in 1952 by Donald A. Glaser, for which he was awarded the ...

s, with the first liquid hydrogen bubble chamber in Western Europe being constructed at the department. Work on satellite instrumentation resulted in departmentally designed equipment ending up on NASA satellites in 1962. Physics continued in the new “old” RCS building until the new Physics building was finished in 1961, which subsequently became known as the Blackett Laboratory.Department History
Accessed 28 January 2017 In 2019, it was announced that the laboratory would be constructing a magnetometer instrument for the European Space Agency

Solar Orbiter The Solar Orbiter (SolO) is a Sun-observing satellite developed by the European Space Agency (ESA). SolO, designed to obtain detailed measurements of the inner heliosphere and the nascent solar wind, will also perform close observations of ...

in a mission to study the

Sun The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radi ...

. The satellite launched on an

Atlas V Atlas V is an expendable launch system and the fifth major version in the Atlas launch vehicle family. It was originally designed by Lockheed Martin, now being operated by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Lockheed Martin ...

from the

Cape Canaveral AFS Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) is an installation of the United States Space Force's Space Launch Delta 45, located on Cape Canaveral in Brevard County, Florida. Headquartered at the nearby Patrick Space Force Base, the statio ...

, Florida on the 9 February, 2020. In November 2019, a team of Imperial physicists was chosen to design parts of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, which is to be a long baseline accelerator neutrino experiment in the United States.

Academics

Study

Undergraduate

The department offers three year BSc and four year undergraduate

MSci MSCI Inc. is an American finance company headquartered in New York City. MSCI is a global provider of equity, fixed income, real estate indexes, multi-asset portfolio analysis tools, ESG and climate products. It operates the MSCI World, MSCI A ...

courses. The department has connections with universities in Europe, allowing undergraduate master's students to study-abroad during their course. All students graduating with an undergraduate degree from the department are also awarded the Associateship of the

, ARCS. This degree is professionally accredited by the Institute of Physics. Holders of accredited degrees can follow a route to Institute Membership and the CPhys professional qualification.

Postgraduate

Taught postgraduate courses last for one year leading to a

MSc MSC may refer to: Computers * Message Sequence Chart * Microelectronics Support Centre of UK Rutherford Appleton Laboratory * MIDI Show Control * MSC Malaysia (formerly known as Multimedia Super Corridor) * USB mass storage device class (USB MS ...

, with research degrees leading to either a

MRes A Master of Research ( abbr. MRes, MARes, MScRes, or MScR) degree is an internationally recognised advanced postgraduate research degree. In most cases, the degree is designed to prepare students for doctoral research. Increasingly, the degree may ...

or PhD. All students graduating with any of the postgraduate degrees (MSc, MRes, PhD) are also awarded the

Diploma of Imperial College The Diploma of the Imperial College (DIC) is an academic certificate awarded by Imperial College London to its postgraduate students upon graduation. Until 2007, Imperial was part of the University of London The University of London (UoL; ab ...

, DIC. There are also a number of short-courses for practising engineers. Blackett Laboratory Entrance Hall from stairs

Rankings

The college ranks 9th on the Times Higher Education natural sciences subjects rankings, and the department in particular ranks 11th in the world, and 3rd in the UK after

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge becam ...

and Oxford, on the QS World University Rankings. Domestically, the department ranks 6th in the

Complete University Guide Three national rankings of universities in the United Kingdom are published annually – by ''The Complete University Guide'', ''The Guardian'' and jointly by ''The Times'' and ''The Sunday Times''. Rankings have also been produced in the past ...

's 2021 physics rankings. Blackett Laboratory from the Main Walkway

People

The laboratory has connections to many physicists who had studied or taught at the department: * Sir Peter Knight * Sir John Pendry * Sir Tom Kibble * Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee * Sir Steven Cowley *

Edward Hinds Edward Allen Hinds FInstP FAPS FRS (born 8 Sept 1949) is a British physicist noted for his work with cold matter. He was educated at Dame Allan's School in Newcastle before being offered a place at Jesus College, Oxford, where he matriculate ...

* Jenny Nelson *

Fay Dowker Helen Fay Dowker (; born 9 September 1965) is a British physicist who is a current professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London. Education Dowker attended Manchester High School for Girls. As a student, she was interested in wor ...

Jess Wade Jessica Alice Feinmann Wade (born October 1988) is a British physicist in the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College London, specialising in Raman spectroscopy. Her research investigates polymer-based organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). H ...

Michele Dougherty Michele Karen Dougherty One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 1962) is a Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College London. from The Life Scientific She is leading unmanned ...

Joanna Haigh Joanna Dorothy Haigh (born 7 May 1954) is a British physicist and academic. Before her retirement in 2019 she was Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London, and co-director of the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and E ...

* Matt Taylor *

Abdus Salam Mohammad Abdus Salam Salam adopted the forename "Mohammad" in 1974 in response to the anti-Ahmadiyya decrees in Pakistan, similarly he grew his beard. (; ; 29 January 192621 November 1996) was a Punjabis, Punjabi Pakistani theoretical physici ...

* Libby Jackson of the UK Space Agency * Jonathan Pritchard (2017 of the Fowler Award for Astronomy)news at imperial.ac.uk/physics
Accessed 28 January 2017

References

{{Authority control Physics laboratories University and college laboratories in the United Kingdom Departments of Imperial College London Physics departments in the United Kingdom Imperial College Faculty of Natural Sciences Buildings and structures of Imperial College London University and college buildings completed in 1961 Buildings and structures in the City of Westminster