Field trips
Through our network of global partners, our students have opportunities to visit leading labs and facilities like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes in the Canary Islands and the dark matter research facility at Boulby Underground Laboratory.
Astrophysics field trip
Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, La Palma, Canary Islands
Each year up to 10 students who are taking one of our Physics and Astrophysics courses have the opportunity to join a subsidised field trip to the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes on La Palma in the Canary Islands. At 2,400m above sea level, these telescopes are in an almost ideal environment for astronomy.
Students use our pt5m telescope during their own night of observations and can also visit the 4m William Herschel Telescope and the 10m Gran Telescopio Canarias – the largest optical telescope in the world.
Placements on La Palma
Students on a Physics and Astrophysics with an Industrial Placement Year course can spend a year of their degree working at at the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes. It's also possible for students on this course to do their placement at the Thai National Observatory in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
The next generation of astronomy tools
One of our astrophysics lecturers, Professor Vik Dhillon, led the team that built HiPERCAM, a high-speed camera that has been installed on La Palma's Gran Telescopio Canarias. He was also part of the international research team that built the new Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer telescope on the island, to detect optical signatures of gravitational waves.
Other field trips and placements
Sheffield physics students have also had the opportunity to visit other fascinating places through, for example, a year-long work placement, a research internship or a field trip organised by our student society, Physoc. Locations have included:
- CERN, Switzerland, where the ground-breaking Higgs boson discovery was made and many major particle physics experiments take place
- Boulby Underground Laboratory, UK, where scientists are working more than a kilometre below ground to search for dark matter, and study organisms that can survive extreme environments like those on other planets
- ITER, France, the world's largest nuclear fusion experiment
- Fermilab, USA, a high-energy particle physics facility running a wide range of neutrino experiments
Research Excellence Framework 2021
We have been rated 1st in the UK in terms of the quality of our research. In the latest REF, 100 per cent of research and impact from our department has been classed as world-leading or internationally excellent.
International Merit Scholarships
We offer a generous package of financial support for international students including 75 undergraduate scholarships worth £10,000 towards the annual tuition fee and 125 postgraduate taught scholarships worth £5,000 towards the tuition fee. Applications are now open for existing offer holders.