The Institute of Physics (IOP) of NCTU was founded in 1993 to support the development of fundamental sciences in this originally technology-oriented school. Despite its relative youth as an institute and its small size, IOP is energetic in education, research, and international collaborations. This has led to several innovation patents as well as scientific results, which have appeared in Science, Nature, and Physical Review Letters. Together with the faculty in the Department of Electrophysics, IOP significantly broadens the fundamental and applied physics research in NCTU. IOP is also devoted to intensive institutional collaborations with RIKEN of Japan and Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids.
The research of IOP covers four directions: condensed matter physics, medium & high energy and cosmology, atomic & molecular and optical physics, and biomedical physics, among which there are four experimental groups and six theoretical groups. The laboratories and research branches include the following:
• Organic semiconductor laboratory
• Quantum matter physics laboratory
• Cosmic rays laboratory
• Computational physics laboratory
• Soft condensed matter group
• Biophysics and statistical physics group
• High energy physics: lattice gauge theory group
• AMO physics group
• Cosmology group