The student is free to choose his/her PhD thesis title among all research activities present in the Department of Physics (DIFI).

The research activities in nuclear, particle and astro-particle physics address many of the fundamental problems in physics today, often by means of complex detectors with state-of-the-art sensors, microelectronics, data acquisition, and software structures whose main purpose is to handle, filter, store and analyze the huge amount of data which is usually collected by these experiments.

The research activities in experimental condensed matter physics mainly cover the fields of low dimensional physics, the study of the physical properties of innovative materials and micro-systems, the physics of superconducting materials, the physics of nano-structured surfaces and nanotechnologies.

Research in Biophysics includes, among others, bio-informatics and the study of the structure of proteins relevant in some pathologies of the nervous system, mainly by means of STM and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM).

Theoretical physics research is very active in many fields, including quantum field theory, lattice QCD, standard model phenomenology, the simulation of complex systems like molecular clusters and the transport phenomena in fluids and quantum systems, and fluid-dynamics.

Last but not least, several groups are active in physics applied to medicine (both in the analysis and handling of medical images and in the development of innovative techniques for diagnostics and therapy), in physics applied to environment (tracing of pollutant, monitoring of radioactivity and pollution in the atmosphere), in the research aimed at the development on civil nuclear energy, in history of physics and in physics education.