best physics phd programs in the world

Best Universities for Physics in the World

Updated: February 29, 2024

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Below is a list of best universities in the World ranked based on their research performance in Physics. A graph of 966M citations received by 42.9M academic papers made by 6,603 universities in the World was used to calculate publications' ratings, which then were adjusted for release dates and added to final scores.

We don't distinguish between undergraduate and graduate programs nor do we adjust for current majors offered. You can find information about granted degrees on a university page but always double-check with the university website.

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

For Physics

2. University of California - Berkeley

3. Stanford University

4. University of Tokyo

5. Harvard University

6. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

7. University of Cambridge

8. Tsinghua University

9. University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

10. Kyoto University

11. University of California - Los Angeles

12. Cornell University

13. University of Oxford

14. Princeton University

15. University of Washington - Seattle

16. University of Toronto

17. California Institute of Technology

18. Pennsylvania State University

19. University of Texas at Austin

20. University of Wisconsin - Madison

21. Imperial College London

22. Tohoku University

23. Osaka University

24. University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

25. University of California-San Diego

26. Georgia Institute of Technology

27. University of Maryland - College Park

28. Zhejiang University

29. National University of Singapore

30. Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne

31. University of California - Santa Barbara

32. Columbia University

33. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

34. University College London

35. University of Pennsylvania

36. Johns Hopkins University

37. Ohio State University

38. Northwestern University

39. University of Manchester

40. Yale University

41. Shanghai Jiao Tong University

42. Pierre and Marie Curie University

43. Nanyang Technological University

44. University of Science and Technology of China

45. Peking University

46. Texas A&M University - College Station

47. Purdue University

48. Tokyo Institute of Technology

49. University of Chicago

50. University of Florida

51. University of British Columbia

52. Harbin Institute of Technology

53. University of Hong Kong

54. University of Arizona

55. Catholic University of Leuven

56. Delft University of Technology

57. Technical University of Munich

58. University of California - Davis

59. University of Southern California

60. Rutgers University - New Brunswick

61. Carnegie Mellon University

62. Seoul National University

63. Huazhong University of Science and Technology

64. University of Colorado Boulder

65. McGill University

66. Nagoya University

67. Iowa State University

68. University of Alberta

69. University of New South Wales

70. Xi'an Jiaotong University

71. Kyushu University

72. Nanjing University

73. Michigan State University

74. Arizona State University - Tempe

75. Moscow State University

76. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

77. University of Waterloo

78. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

79. University of Sydney

80. New York University

81. Tianjin University

82. North Carolina State University at Raleigh

83. University of Queensland

84. Australian National University

85. University of Utah

86. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

87. Fudan University

88. Jilin University

89. University of Sao Paulo

90. Tel Aviv University

91. Lund University

93. Duke University

94. University of Pittsburgh

95. Technical University of Denmark

96. University of California - Irvine

97. University of Southampton

98. South China University of Technology

99. University of Melbourne

100. Heidelberg University - Germany

Physics subfields in the World