University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Department of Physics and Astronomy offers both the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees in physics. Faculty members who teach physics courses are at the forefront of research in physics both in experiment and in theory.

In the field of elementary particles, faculty members currently perform experiments in Hawai‘i, the mainland U.S., France, Italy, Japan, and Antarctica to study neutrinos and  high-energy gamma rays coming from the stars and search for dark matter particles. Others are involved in experiments at the KEKB accelerator in Japan, studying particle production and decay and the violation of particle/anti-particle symmetry.  Faculty members are involved in the space-based AMS experiment and on the development of techniques for dark matter searches. Neutrino physics research is also conducted at Fermi lab and CERN, while the direct search for dark matter is conducted in Italy.

The particle theory group is involved in the identification of new physics that addresses new questions in particle physics and cosmology that are beyond the scope of the Standard Model, and the development of strategies that distinguish this new physics from the Standard Model phenomena.  In condensed-matter physics, they investigate nano-materials and use a scanning tunneling microscope to take pictures of individual atoms.   Often, undergraduate physics majors work on these projects along with graduate students and the faculty.