Welcome To KFUPM Physics

Welcome to the Department of Physics at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. I invite you to explore our website where you can find information about our academic programs, courses, research activities, and faculty members. Physics has always been at the forefront of exploration. This is accomplished through cognitive enhancement by education transmitted through academic courses as well as carrying out research at the cutting-edge frontiers of human knowledge. The Physics department offer courses that are solidly based on the American system to meet international quality assurance requirements, which has placed the Department as a world-class regional center in a leading international institution. Our student body includes pure-physics students and double-major students, which reflects the interdisciplinary nature of our program. In addition, our research facilities span various fields of physics including condensed matter physics, lasers, materials research, magnetism and superconductivity, nuclear physics, and nonlinear and computational physics. Over the past five decades, our faculty members have conducted research using in-house facilities as well as collaborative research with national and international centers.

Mohammad Al-Kuhaili,
Professor & Chairman, Physics Department

Research and Academic activity statistics 2015 to 2021

3.1

Average Impact Factor Publications​

51

Patents

10042

Cumulative Citation Count​

452

Publications

Recent News

View all news

Recent Events

View all events
Seminar

Nonlinear Optical Probing and Control of Magnetic and Electronic Quantum Geometry

Speaker:
Dr. Gregory Fiete
Professor of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston

Date: Wednesday, May 14th, 2025
Time: 11:00 a.m.

Location: Bldg. 6/Room 125

Abstract:
Illuminating a material with light can reveal both interesting aspects of electronic and lattice degrees of freedom, as well as drive phase and topological transitions in the material itself. In this talk, I will focus on three distinct responses of a material to light: (1) Nonlinear phononic control of magnetism in bilayer CrI , MnBi Te , and MnSb Te. (2) The non-linear photogalvanic response of Weyl semimetals with tilted cones and chiral charge up to 4 (the largest allowed in a lattice model), as well as the topological superconductor candidate 4Hb-TaS , and (3) The coupling of phonons to electronic degrees of freedom to produce chiral phonons with large g factors of order 1, which can be measured with Raman scattering.  I will discuss how these nonlinear responses are related to the underlying quantum geometry of the Bloch states and present a perspective on interesting frontiers in out-of-equilibrium quantum materials.

Biography:
Greg Fiete received his PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard University, and did postdoctoral work at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. He was a Lee A. DuBridge Prize Fellow in Theoretical Physics at Caltech. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award, a DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics, and a Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. Currently, he serves as the head of center for quantum matter and correlated electron theory at Northeastern University and is an affiliated faculty at MIT.

All faculty, researchers and students are invited to attend.

 

    Location and Time
  • 6/125

  • 14 May, 2025

  • 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM