The Department of Physics and Astronomy doctoral program at Washington State University is designed to produce leaders in industry, in academia, and at national laboratories. The department's progressive environment seeks to provide an atmosphere that fosters intellectual growth and quantitative reasoning. The program engages students in teaching and research activities that provide the skills, knowledge, and ability for critical thinking that will enable them to be productive members of society. In the process, our goal is to lay the foundations for technological advances that improve our quality of life. Research in the astronomy and astrophysics program usually falls into topics related to gravitational physics, sources for gravitational waves, stars, galaxies, galaxy formation and chemical enrichment, and cosmology. Students in the astrophysics program are involved in at least one research project that tackles a problem at the current edge of human understanding.<br><br>View weird quantum effects in the Bose-Einstein Condenstate laboratory. Investigate the theory of cold quantum gases, many-body physics, chaos, and complexity. Here, the ''normal'' rules do not apply.<br><br>Research on Novel States of Matter focuses on ultracold quantum gases and systems that exhibit chaos and complexity. Exceptionally strong theoretical and experimental programs in this area give students research experience at the frontiers of physics.