Blackett Laboratory

The Department of Physics at Imperial College dates back to the physics department of the Normal School of Science, later the Royal College of Science. As part of the formation of Imperial, the Royal College was moved into a new building at South Kensington in 1906, which also housed the Chemistry Department. From 1906 to 1932 the head of the Physics Department was Prof. H. L. Callender, famous for his work on the properties of steam.[6]

G P Thomson (son of J J Thomson) replaced Callender in 1932, and worked in part on nuclear physics and atomic weaponry. He was followed P. M. S. Blackett as head in around 1953, with the construction of the new Physics building starting at about the same time. Blackett refocused efforts from low-energy physics to high-energy nuclear physics, and under him research started into cosmic rays and the use of bubble chambers, with the first liquid hydrogen bubble chamber in Western Europe being constructed at the department. Work on satellite instrumentation resulted in departmentally designed equipment ending up on NASA satellites in 1962. Physics continued in the new “old” RCS building until the new Physics building was finished in 1961, which subsequently became known as the Blackett Laboratory.[7][8] In 2019, it was announced that the laboratory would be constructing a magnetometer instrument for the European Space Agency Solar Orbiter in a mission to study the Sun.[9][10] The satellite launched on an Atlas V from the Cape Canaveral AFS, Florida on the 9 February, 2020.[11] In November 2019, a team of Imperial physicists was chosen to design parts of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, which is to be a long baseline accelerator neutrino experiment in the United States.[12]

The laboratory has connections to many physicists who had studied or taught at the department: