The Ministry of Education & Training has authorized DTU to offer Doctoral programs in three fields in Physics: Theoretical & Mathematical Physics, Solid-State Physics, and Atomic & Nuclear Physics.
To be given permission for training in three physics fields at once once more affirms DTU’s unshakable capabilities founded in a high-quality team of researchers and lecturers combined with the infrastructure to ensure the training of the human resources in the rather distinctive field of physics nowadays.
The main participants in the PhD training for these three physics fields are the full-time researchers working at DTU’s three research institutes: the Institute of Theoretical & Applied Research (ITAR) in Hanoi, the Institute for Research & Development (IRD) in Danang, and the Institute of Fundamental Science & Application (IFSA) in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC).
Atomic & Nuclear Physics
As it is the highest degree in existence, not just any education institution can provide training for it. Atomic & Nuclear Physics is furthermore a very special field and only four schools can provide direct training in it: the National Universities in Hanoi and HCMC, the Vietnam Academy of Science & Technology, and the Atomic Energy Institute of Vietnam. To become the lonely school permitted to offer PhD training, DTU needed a lot of strengths and differences, especially its team of researchers.
National and international conferences in physics are organized regularly to allow scientists to exchange and share experience
The ITAR in Hanoi counts Prof. Dr Nguyen Van Do with over fifty journals in ISI-indexed journals. The IFSA in HCMC counts Assoc.Prof. Dr Tran Hoai Nam with over forty, and the IRD in Danang has Dr Kazuhito Mizuyama with twenty-five. The scientists in this field have been or are National Foundation for Science & Technology Development (NAFOSTED) project leaders with from one to four projects awarded to them, and they are working on a state-funded project in nuclear physics. Each individual scientist has interesting science stories or special professional impressions to recount: Prof. Dr Nguyen Van Do was awarded a Vietnam Talent Award in 2011 for his “Study of nuclear structure and nuclear reactions”, Assoc.Prof. Dr Tran Hoai Nam was awarded the Vietnamese Theoretical Physics Society Young Researcher Prize in 2016, and Assoc.Prof. Dr Nguyen Quang Hung is a member of the Nafosted Scientific Council and tasked with evaluating project submissions in nuclear physics. The aforementioned people furthermore have many years of experience in the training of a lot of research students in Atomic & Nuclear Physics.
Students selected to work on PhDs in this field will have the opportunity to take part in the research and research projects of the scientists at DTU, who published papers in prestigious journals in the field, such as:
- in Nuclear physics: Physical Review Letters, Physics Letters B, Physical Review C, European Physical Journal A, etc.
- in Nuclear reactor physics: Annals of Nuclear Engineering, Nuclear Engineering & Design, Nuclear Technology, etc.
- in Application of nuclear radiation to the study of materials structure: Chemosphere, Optics Express, Journal of Alloys & Compounds, Journal of Applied Physics, etc.
Solid-State Physics
The research groups in this field count both a lot of highly seasoned scientists and very enthusiastic young scientists. The ITAR in Hanoi counts eleven scientists: two professors, four associate professors, and five PhD holders without professorial titles, making for a strong research group. With their many years of research experience, the group published almost two hundred papers in ISI-indexed journals in the last five years, including many in the Q1 range and with impact factor (IF) of > 7. They published in prestigious journals like Sensors & Actuators B: Chemical, Applied Surface Science, and the Journal of Electronic Materials. Nearly all of the group members are leaders or key members of a lot of science & technology projects with a variety of funding sources and they have experience at the successful guidance of a lot of PhD theses in Solid-State Physics and in Materials Science. The research group in Danang counts seven members; they published up to over thirty papers in leading journals like Physical Review X, Physical Review B, and Physical Review Materials, and they have been working on many projects tasked by ministries and funded by Nafosted.
Research students will be able to do research in modern laboratories
DTU continues investing in modern infrastructure, such as a modern sample-preparation system for polycrystalline and nanosize samples, and modern measuring equipment such as an FL3-22 fluorescence spectrum analyzer, an Xplora Raman analyzer with included low-temperature regulator, a DeltaHub lifetime meter, a scanning electron microscope (SEM), etc. to be used in a variety of current research avenues:
- Optical materials,
- Low-dimensional and layered materials,
- Advanced materials for environmental treatment,
- Electromagnetic absorbing materials,
- Electromagnetic materials.
- Materials that convert and store energy,
Theoretical & Mathematical Physics
The nine scientists in this field can be found at both ITAR and IRD. In the last five years, they published over a hundred prestigious international Web of Science-indexed papers, including in leading journals in the field like Physical Review B and Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, or in journals counting for the Nature Index. They furthermore worked on research projects with various funding sources. Of note among them are Dr Phan Van Nham, who was awarded the Vietnamese Theoretical Physics Society Young Researcher Prize in 2014, and Ho Khac Hieu, at 31 the youngest associate professor in Vietnam.
To support scientific research, DTU invested in modern infrastructure with high-performances computers and software for use in simulation and computation, such as VASP, Gaussian, and MATLAB. This will help research students in their thesis projects. The research in this field is focused on:
- Strongly correlated electronic systems,
- Two-dimensional materials and van der Waals heterostructures,
- XAFS spectra according to the Debye model of non-harmonic correlation for crystals with different structures.
“Physics is one of the earliest academic disciplines and it plays an important role in the creation of technologies and in opening new research avenues in the natural sciences and in engineering,” Assoc.Prof. Tran Ngoc, a solid-state researcher at the IRD, explains. “During the industrial revolution 4.0, training highly qualified and adaptable human resources is import for the development of science & technology to new heights. Right at DTU there is now a rather professional environment for science research and training research students, especially in the natural sciences. Besides dynamism in international collaboration, the synergy of knowledge and experience from well-established professors and dynamic and creative young PhDs is leading to a new level of efficiency in research and PhD training here at DTU.”
(Media Center)