A DPhil (PhD) in Particle Physics covers a wide range of topics from the study of new particles produced at high-energy accelerators to neutrinos, dark matter, and dark energy in the Universe and experiments are carried out at facilities around the world.
Oxford’s particle physics experimental group is one of the largest in the world; it includes 28 academics and almost 50 research and technical staff and we support more than 80 postgraduate research students. Our doctoral students have the opportunity to join world-class experimental physics research: our research portfolio includes ATLAS and LHCb at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN; the DUNE long-baseline neutrino experiment, MicroBooNE, and MAGIS-100 and the LZ dark matter direct detection experiment in the USA; T2K, Super-K and Hyper-K in Japan; the Mu3e experiments at PSI; the BES-III experiment in China; the Rubin-LSST programme in Chile, and the AION experiment in Oxford, and the SNO+ neutrino detector in Canada. We play a leading role in exploiting existing facilities, and we have critical roles in the design and development of future experiments. We have superb in-house research facilities, and we host the John Adams Institute for accelerator physics research.
Open days
We run an open day for prospective graduate students in December – whether in-person or online – for entry the following year. It is an opportunity to meet supervisors as well as some of our postdocs and current graduate students. We will reimburse reasonable expenses for travel within the UK. Please retain all receipts if you wish to make such an expense claim.
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Funding
Read comprehensive information on fees and funding for graduate students. Please note that in order to be considered for any of the UKRI funding sources, you are required to submit your application before the earlier deadline of Friday 5th January 2024.
How to apply
All applications must be made through the central University of Oxford graduate admissions website where you will find information about applying to any of the six DPhil courses on offer at the Department of Physics.
It is important to note that you are not required to select a final project or supervisor at the point of application; while it is useful for us to know the broad areas you are interested in, we do not expect you to have made a final decision on your preferred projects and there will be opportunities to discuss your interests before offers are made.
If you would like to apply for more than one DPhil course, there is no need to complete a separate application for each or pay more than one application fee; please refer to the instructions for applying to related courses.