ENGINEERING WITH PHYSICS

While pure physics is mainly concerned with understanding why nature behaves the way it does, applied physics asks a different question: How can that understanding be used to solve a problem, create a new capability or improve an existing technology?

This is also where applied physics begins to overlap with engineering. Pure physics focuses on discovering and explaining fundamental mechanisms and natural laws. Applied physics takes those principles and explores how they can be translated into useful methods, devices or technological concepts. Engineering then takes those concepts further by designing, integrating, optimizing and scaling them into reliable systems. In practice, an applied physicist must often combine deep physics understanding with engineering thinking, connecting multiple technical disciplines to make a complex system work.

In this program, students experience that transition through a microwave plasma system. They follow how electrical energy is converted into electromagnetic radiation using a magnetron, how microwaves propagate through waveguides, and how they interact with matter inside a low-pressure environment. Under suitable conditions, electrons gain energy, collisions lead to ionization, and plasma is formed.

What makes this system especially interesting is the interdisciplinary understanding required to make it work. It brings together electromagnetic radiation, vacuum technology, electrical engineering, plasma physics, material science, chemistry, thermal processes and system integration.

The same physics-engineering platform can then be explored for challenging real-world applications such as hydrogen production, artificial diamond growth, waste management, gas cleaning, water sterilization, medical-equipment sterilization, material processing and advanced chemical conversion.