Established | 27 January 1999 | Govt of Pakistan
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Field of research
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Director | Dr. Hafeez R. Hoorani |
Professor Riazuddin | |
Staff | M. Arif Mehmood, Nasir Mehmood, Anwar Baig, |
Address | Shahdra Valley Road |
Location | Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan |
Zip code
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2141 |
Campus | Quaid-i-Azam University |
Collaborations
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Website | www |
The Professor Abdus Salam Centre for Physics (Urdu: قومی انسٹی ٹیوٹ طبیعیات کے لئے), previously known as National Centre for Physics NCP(Govt of Pakistan), is an academic physics and mathematical sciences national research institute located in Islamabad— federal capital of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Since 1999, the Pakistan Government had the jurisdiction of the institute until March 2004 when the institute was made an scientific organisation in April 2004, though the funding do arrange by the Pakistan Government. Establishment of the NCP was first proposed in 1951. It is under the de facto control of the Strategic Plans Division (Ministry of Defence) of the Pakistan Army.
Since its inception in 1999, the institute operates quadripartite supervision of ICTP, PAEC, INSC, and CERN, and main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for theoretical and high-energy physics research. As of today, the NCP emerged as world's leading particle physics institute producing hundreds of papers by world's scientists who joined this institute, and numerous scientific experiments have been constructed at NCP by national and international collaborations to make use of them.
Establishing world-class physics research institutes was proposed by a number of scientists. The roots of NCP institutes go back to when Nobel laureate professor Abdus Salam, after receiving his doctorate in physics, came back to Pakistan in 1951. Joining his alma mater, Government College University as Professor of Mathematics in 1951, Salam made an effort to establish the physics institute but was unable to do so. The same year, he became chairman of the Mathematics Department of the Punjab University where he tried to revolutionise the department by introducing the course of Quantum Mechanics necessary for undergraduate students, but it was soon reverted by the vice-chancellor. He soon faced the choice between intellectual death or migration to the stimulating environment of a western institutions. This choice, however, left a deep impression on him and was behind his determination to create an institution to which physicists from developing countries would come as a right to interact with their peers from industrially advanced countries without permanently leaving their own countries. This resulted in founding to the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) by Professor Abdus Salam in Italy.