In Greifswald he started numerous activities for the recovery of the respect of the physical sciences. To it belongs the establishment of the physical institute in 1857. It is remarkable that the inventor of the influence electricity machine, Wilhelm Holtz, began to work in 1876 in Greifswald, under von Freilitzsch. Since that time von Freilitzsch pursued with emphasis his largest goal: the establishment of a new institution building. This aim reached however his successor Anton Oberbeck. The new, generously executed institute building offered for the further development of the department favorable requirements. The building is the today home of the physics department.
As directors several international well known physicist worked here in the following period in Greifswald, under them Gustav Mie (1905 - 1917), the winner of the Nobel prize award Johannes Stark (1917 - 1920) and Rudolf Seeliger (1940 - 1955).
In 1918 Seeliger became a professor of physics in Greifswald and developed himself in the following period as one of the pioneers of gas discharge physics and plasma physics. When after the war, in February 1946, the university opened their gates again, Seeliger became the first rector of the university. Seeliger worked here in Greifswald up to his death in 1955.
Physics in Greifswald is dominated through the school of Seeliger, whereby new theoretical and experimental methods have found entrance in the classical physics of gasdischarges.
Today the field of physics in Greifswald subdivides itself in the science areas of
Experimental physics
Theoretical physics
Applied physics and
Physics didactics.
A further important fact for the physics of gasdischarges in Greifswald is the institute for low temperature plasma physics at the university (INP), a former institution of the academy of science.
With the German reunification in 1990 came decisive restructures at the East German universities and at research institutions. In Greifswald this structure change is largely completed. A renewed department of physics at the university, the foundationb of the institute of lowtemperature plasma physics and the comming up Max Planck institute of Plasma Physics, a underdepartment of Garching for the installation of the Wendelstein 7-X fusion experiment.
The department of physics has today 57 staff members, under them 35 scientists. Many of them work on a project (Sonderforschungsbereich 198) in the field of the research of kinetics of partially ionized plasmas of the German research community (DFG), in cooperation with scientists from the Rostock and Kiel universities.
After the political change in East Germany the contacts to the foreign partner universities of Greifswald was renewed. So keep occasionally physics students of Greifswald as trainees at the university of Lund in Sweden.