Temple University is a large state-related university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. The University has a combined enrollment, both undergraduate and graduate, of nearly 30,000 students. While maintaining a definite urban flavor, the main campus with its tree-lined malls, landscaped gardens and grassy plazas is aesthetically appealing.

The Physics Department is housed in a large modern air-conditioned building, Barton Hall, (shown above) which contains lecture halls, classrooms, faculty and graduate student offices, a departmental library, a computing room, a machine shop, an electronics shop, a student shop, a materials preparation laboratory, and extensive research laboratory facilities. In addition to an extensive reading collection housed in Paley Library, Temple University's main library, the department has its own library which contains a large collection of physics books as well as the current and back issues of over 200 of the most frequently used physics journals. Computing facilities with extensive networking capabilities are available in the department's computing room and in research groups in physics.

The principal areas of current departmental research, which are described more fully elsewhere, are theoretical and experimental elementary particle physics, theoretical and experimental condensed matter physics, theoretical and experimental atomic, molecular and optical physics, statistical mechanics, and relativity. Much of this research is conducted locally using excellent facilities within the department. In addition, several research groups use outside laboratories such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.