News and features - archive

Following a special call in partnership with the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) for proposals in the field of nanospintronics, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has awarded a grant of nearly £200,000 to Professor Walther Schwarzacher and his group for research on magneto-transport across single molecules. The project will be carried out in partnership with Professor Richard Nichols' group in Liverpool and Professor Bing-Wei Mao's group in Xiamen, China.

Spintronics represents a new direction for electronics as it exploits the spin of the electron as well as the more familiar electron charge. Spin is a quantum mechanical property, and its consequences are seen in the magnetic behaviour of materials. Spintronic devices are already in production, for example, the sensor used to read information on magnetic hard disks. However, these and most other existing spintronic devices are made only of metals and oxides.

Introducing new materials will create exciting new opportunities, and this project will look at how organic molecules can be integrated into spintronic devices. The researchers aim to make the smallest spintronic devices possible, consisting of two magnetic metal contacts joined by a single molecule, as shown in the illustration (courtesy of Doug Szumski), and measure their magneto-transport properties (how the electric current is affected by a magnetic field). The project will make use of the facilities of the University of Bristol's new Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information (NSQI), which provides state-of-the-art specialised laboratories whose vibration and acoustic noise levels are amongst the lowest achieved anywhere world-wide. Following the award of this grant, Prof Schwarzacher's group has a vacancy for a PhD student.


Students from King Edward VI School in Chelmsford visited the Department of Physics on 15 July with two of their teachers, to collect components of a cosmic ray detector. The pupils intend to build their own spark chamber and the paddles they are holding will be an essential component of the trigger system. The paddles were constructed by work experience students with funding from a Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) outreach grant, under the guidance of Dr David Cussans, Dr Helen Heath and Mr Steve Nash of the Particle Physics Group.

Dr Cussans reports that in an act of scientific recycling he was able to retrieve photo-multipliers tubes, which are sensitive to very low light levels, from the recently decommissioned ZEUS experiment at DESY to use in the detector. "ZEUS was my thesis experiment," he explained, "and it was great to enable parts of it to help educate another generation of students."


What sort of day-to-day challenges would the first astronauts to set foot on Mars have to face? What sort of science could be done in a minimal laboratory? Along with a team of six interns and scientists from the European Space Agency, Danielle Wills, a fourth year undergraduate, spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah to find out.
Danni writes:

The idea behind the Mars Desert Research Station is that if we are ever to take root on other planets and as such become a truly spacefaring species, Mars is the natural choice for the first port of call, being as similar to Earth as any planet that we know of, and well within our reach. In the future, it might even be possible to terraform Mars such that humans could live there without having to wear pressurized space suits or oxygen tanks. This is the vision of Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society. But for now, elementary level work needs to done, and although we cannot simulate the lack of pressure, the gravity and climate on Mars, there are one or two sites on Earth where we can come as close to Martian conditions as we can get.

In the Utah desert, where the Mars Society has erected MARS DIRECT, a human habitat unit (the ‘Hab’) designed to provide basic living and working facilities for a team of six astronauts, scientists can glimpse the first steps of what a manned mission to Mars might involve. Living in the desert involves following a strict schedule put together by the Crew Commander. There are technology demonstration, research and human crew related aspects to the daily programme. On the research side, many days are spent venturing out into the harsh desert in search of biology and geology samples for laboratory analysis. Such extra-vehicular activity is generally carried out in space suits to simulate the working conditions that astronauts would have to contend with on Mars. The heavy suits can turn simple expeditions into tiresome and cumbersome activities: one's sense of touch is impaired by the gloves, one's other senses are impaired by the helmet. Back at the Hab, water is strictly limited, showers are few, and the daily menu is from a humble hamper of freeze-dried foods that the ‘Director of Galley Operations’ is expected to turn into something palatable. Each day, several test sheets are filled out by the crew members to record their psychological well-being.
 

Danielle's role in the group was to conduct the astrobiology experiments, which involved extracting DNA from soil samples and identifying microbial communities by way of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technique. Riddled with signs of ancient liquid water activity and abundant in many elements essential for life, Mars may hold the answer to one of the biggest questions that man may ask, "Are we alone?". Searching for signs of life will therefore be a primary goal for any science expedition to Mars, and PCR, being a fast, simple and sensitive technique, might just be the way to do it.

It has been forty years since man placed foot on another world. The next frontier is within our grasp technologically, but there are many other aspects to a manned mission to Mars. Modest Danielle said she "hopes to have made a tiny contribution to the knowledge base and preparations that will see us on our way to the Red Planet".

Pictured above: Danni in Utah, "Astronauts" survey the Utah desert landscape.


A team of physicists and engineers at the University of Bristol has demonstrated exquisite control of single particles of light - photons - on a silicon chip to make a major advance towards long-sought-after quantum technologies, including super-powerful quantum computers and ultra-precise measurements.

The Bristol Centre for Quantum Photonics has demonstrated precise control of four photons using a microscopic metal electrode lithographically patterned onto a silicon chip. The photons propagate in silica waveguides – much like in optical fibres – patterned on a silicon chip, and are manipulated with the electrode, resulting in a high-performance miniaturized device.

"We have been able to generate and manipulate entangled states of photons on a silicon chip" said PhD student, Jonathan Matthews, who together with Alberto Politi performed the experiments. "These entangled states are responsible for famously ‘weird’ behaviour arising in quantum mechanics, but are also at the heart of powerful quantum technologies."

"This precise manipulation is a very exciting development for fundamental science as well as for future quantum technologies," said Prof Jeremy O'Brien, Director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics, who led the research.

The team reports its results in the latest issue of Nature Photonics [June 2009], a sister journal of the leading science journal Nature, and in a postdeadline paper at the International Quantum Electronics Conference (IQEC) on June 4 in Baltimore, USA [IQEC Postdeadline Papers]. More at the University of Bristol's News pages.

Above: An artist's impression of the on-chip quantum metrology experiment (making ultraprecise measurements on chip).
Will Amery, University of Bristol.

Professor Walther Schwarzacher and Dr Oksana Kasyutich have been awarded nearly €700,000 in research funding under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) as part of a project entitled Magnonics: Mastering Magnons in Magnetic Meta-Materials.

Magnons are magnetic excitations and the new subject of magnonics involves exploiting their properties, just as electronics involves exploiting the properties of the electron. Research in Bristol will focus on making novel, nano-scale periodic magnetic materials, so-called "magnonic crystals", capable of transporting and confining magnons.

Image right: Periodic array of magnetic nanoparticles - of great interest for magnonics applications.


Professor Peter Barham was keynote speaker at the 2nd international African Penguin Conference in Gansbaal, Western Cape, South Africa, in April. He summarised the views of researchers: "In common with all those who have been working with African penguins in the last few years, I have noticed the steep decline in numbers with much concern and even some alarm. We need to understand the underlying causes; of course, food supply must be a major factor. But we do not know for sure whether this is caused by overfishing, by fish stocks moving with changing ocean currents due to effects of global warming, or even whether the penguins are less able to find fish than previously (they may be weaker due to, for example, build up of pollutants over the years). Other issues affecting penguins include increased predation by fur seals around some colonies, the continuing risk of oil spills, and as the climate warms up the lack of suitable, cool, places to breed within the traditional colonies.

"We can address some of these issues head on. We can provide suitable nesting sites (the Dyer Island Conservation Trust nest boxes are a prime example of how this can be done); we already do request that rogue seals found taking large numbers of penguins are culled; and we can argue for reductions in the fishing quotas around the main colonies. But we also need to continue research to understand better the underlying causes of the decline. If we are to be able to correlate penguin population decline with, for example, the amount of fish taken by the purse seine fisheries around the main colonies, we need accurately to establish the population numbers and how they are changing, to have reliable estimates of annual breeding success at all the colonies, as well as good data on where the penguins are foraging and how long they spend at sea to find the food they need to feed themselves and their chicks. It is only with such reliable data that we are likely to be able to persuade the fishermen to change their behaviour.

"However, this may not be enough. If we find that the problems arise from movement of fish, rather then reduction in the number of fish, we need to learn how we can persuade penguins to form new colonies closer to the fish stocks. Again this requires some basic research so that we can understand what factors influence young birds to form new colonies rather than simply returning to their natal colony. This is something we are starting to do in the chick bolstering project with the hand reared orphaned chicks taken each year from Dyer Island.

"I believe that if we continue with all the current efforts there is a good chance that we can understand well enough what the problems are before they become insurmountable, and that we will be able to take appropriate actions to prevent the species becoming extinct."

Pictured right, Wilfred Chivell, Chair of the Dyer Island Conservation Trustees introduces Professor Peter Barham of the University of Bristol. At the conference it was revealed that 147,000 breeding pairs of African Penguins were reported in 1956 - dropping to only 36,000 pairs by 2006.

For further details on research, the decline in penguin numbers and the factors involved, and a report of the conference see the Dyer Island Conservation Trust web site.


Bristol's Dr Neil Fox, along with Professors Mike Ashfold, David Cherns and Mervyn Miles, has been awarded one of nine E.ON International Research Awards for 2008, for his project entitled 'Lithiated Nanoparticle Diamond Solar Converter'. The award of 980 thousand euros is funding a three year programme of materials research and prototype development.

Dr Fox attended the E.ON International Research Initiative Conference in Dusseldorf on 28 April to give an invited talk and receive his award.

 
Images: Dr Fox is presented with his award by the German Minister for Innovation, Science, Research and Technology; Dr Fox (right) talks to the moderator of the awards ceremony the scientist and journalist Dr Ranga Yogeshwar; and with PhD student Tomas Martin, promoting their research plans in front of their electronic poster.

Dr Neil Fox, of the University of Bristol's Department of Physics, works with Professor Mike Ashfold of the School of Chemistry, and Professors David Cherns and Mervyn Miles of the Department of Physics. Further details at E.ON web site and press release (pdf).


The idea that far distant particles can somehow 'talk' to each other so perturbed Einstein that he called such weirdness 'spooky action'. Scientists today are learning how to use the quantum entanglement that gives rise to spooky correlations as a resource and now a team of physicists at the University of Bristol and Imperial College London have harnessed this phenomenon to shed light on another unusual and previously intractable aspect of quantum physics - that of distinguishing between two similar quantum operations.

In the everyday world any process can be visualised as some black box with an input and an output. To identify a box you simply apply some input, measure the output and deduce what happened in between. But quantum black boxes are different. Distinguishing between two quantum black boxes that are similar can be impossible with only single particle inputs since it is not generally possible to then distinguish the different outputs.

The Bristol-Imperial team demonstrate how distinguishing between two similar quantum boxes becomes possible when quantum entanglement is used. Anthony Laing, the Bristol PhD student who performed the study, said: "Apart from providing insight into the fundamentals of quantum physics, this work is also crucial for future quantum technologies. How else could a future quantum engineer build a quantum computer if s/he can't tell which circuits s/he has?"

This work was performed in the Bristol Centre for Quantum Photonics led by Professor Jeremy O'Brien as part of a collaboration with Dr Terry Rudolph at Imperial College London. See, too, the University of Bristol's News pages.


Researchers from the University of Bristol were selected to showcase their groundbreaking research and innovative technology to MPs in the Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) for Britain event.

Drs Ruth Oulton of the Centre for Communications Research and the Department of Physics and Jonathan Matthews of the Department of Physics attended the event, which took place in the House of Commons on 9 March 2009. They presented their research at a poster session attended by Members of both Houses of Parliament.

The event provided an excellent opportunity to highlight the cutting-edge research of early-stage researchers and to meet others working in a wide range of engineering and science disciplines. It also provided an opportunity to highlight to MPs and Peers the importance of university research and innovation to the UK economy.

Ruth Oulton, an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellow at Bristol, was awarded the runner-up prize in the Engineering section for her work on Spins and Light for Quantum Computing.

The Bristol delegates met Stephen Williams, MP for Bristol West and Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, and Dr Douglas Naysmith, MP for Bristol North West and Chairman of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee.

To find out more about Dr Oulton's project, see Spins and Light for Quantum Computing (PDF, 1.2KB).


Dr Jitu Shah, Emeritus Research Fellow in the Department of Physics, has been awarded the 2009 Brunel Prize by the Bristol Industrial Archaeological Society. Dr Shah received the award for an outstanding original piece of research on the efforts of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his father Marc Brunel to produce a new and better form of engine power than steam.

Dr Shah's research provides a detailed scientific account of the Brunels' experiments for constructing an engine powered by liquefied carbon dioxide.

Find out more on the University of Bristol's News pages.


When Charles Frank arrived in Bristol in 1946 as a newly appointed lecturer in Physics, he brought with him his young wife Maita. Over 60 years later, in April 2009, she passed away at the age of 90, having contributed greatly and for many years to the life of the university and the city. The University of Bristol recently paid tribute to Lady Frank.


Bristol's Department of Physics is delighted to report that the Institute of Physics (IoP) has renewed accreditation for all of our undergraduate degree programmes. The IoP's team visited the department in December 2008, reviewed our curricula and interviewed staff and students. The aim of the IoP's accreditation process is to provide an independent and rigorous assessment of physics degree courses, and this success is testament to the quality of Bristol's popular degree programmes.

Find out more at the Undergraduate Admissions pages and Institute of Physics web site.


As part of National Science and Engineering Week, 6 - 15 March, Professor Peter Barham features on BBC Bristol's web site. Read Science Week: perfect omelette to discover Professor Barham's views on why science matters.


The Center for Device Thermography and Reliability (CDTR) in Bristol, headed by Professor Martin Kuball, is playing a crucial role in the recently announced GREAT² programme of the European Space Agency (ESA), contributing its leading expertise in thermal management and thermal characterization of future space components. The GREAT² programme, which involves partners from across Europe, aims to establish a European-based supply chain for GaN electronic devices to be used in future ESA space programmes.

Find out more on the news pages at compoundsemiconductor.net.


Physicists worldwide are eagerly anticipating this year's restart of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's highest-energy particle collider. Bristol's particle physics group has designed and built components of two major experiments at CERN, and data to be collected there this year will be held in Bristol and analysed in pursuit of new fundamental laws of nature. Even before the LHC restarts, however, the design of a new generation of even more challenging experiments has begun.

The Particle Physics Group has received a £570,000 grant from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to carry out research and development for a major upgrade of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector. A new machine known as "Super-LHC" (SLHC) will collide particles at ten times the rate of the existing LHC, starting in around 2020. This vast increase in intensity will allow a much greater sensitivity for rare particle decays, and provides the means for discoveries made at the LHC to be explored in detail. However, experiments at SLHC will be even more challenging, requiring detection and data processing technology exceeding the current state-of-the-art. The new grant award confirms Bristol's position at the forefront of particle detector research.

Dr Dave Newbold will lead an international team in simulation studies of a new trigger system for CMS, collaborating with Dr Joel Goldstein, whose team will focus on the design of a complete new inner tracker. Dr Chris Hill will take charge of the design and testing of very high performance silicon sensor systems using new facilities in the Department. Bristol will partner Imperial College, Brunel University and Rutherford Laboratory in these new projects, paving the way for a major new detector construction effort in the UK, complementing the LHC data analysis effort.


An interactive exhibit linking computer science and conservation helped bring research to life for MPs, policy makers, members of the public and school children at the 2008 Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. Visitors had the chance to don a penguin-patterned apron and find out first-hand how technology can be used to identify individual animals from their unique colour patterns, thereby minimising any disruption to the penguins' lives that might be caused by more usual catch and tag approaches to identification. When wearing a specific penguin apron, each person was identified by the computer as Percy, Pippa, or Peter Penguin, all from a real-time video stream.

The display showed videos of wild penguins being tracked and demonstrated the software which identified patterns on penguins along similar lines to a biometric passport reader.

"The software was designed to recognise unique chest patterns on penguins, which would otherwise be caught and fitted with a metal identification ring on the flipper" said Peter Barham, part of the project team. "Using this technology reduces any welfare impact of our research on the penguins dramatically, as well as increasing the quantity and quality of population data by orders of magnitude." Read about the exhibition on the university web site at Spot the Penguin. To find out more about the project, including the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture 2008, see http://www.spotthepenguin.com/.


An international team of physicists led by Professor Nigel Hussey has made a breakthrough in the understanding of the complex but technologically important materials known as high temperature superconductors.

According to the adage "what scatters may also pair" Professor Hussey and his team used ultra high (pulsed) magnetic fields, some of the most powerful in the world in fact, to destroy the superconductivity and follow the form of the electrical resistance down to temperatures close to absolute zero.

In so doing, the team were able to reveal new information about the metallic state from which high temperature superconductivity emerges, information that will now help theorists to develop a more complete theory for their highly unusual metallic and superconducting properties. This work has just been published as a Research Article in the prestigious journal Science.


A team of physicists and engineers has demonstrated an optical device that filters two particles of light (or photons) based on the correlations between their polarisation that are only allowed in the seemingly bizarre quantum world. This "entanglement filter" passes the pair of photons only if they inhabit the same quantum state, without the user (or anything else) ever knowing what that state is.

This device will have many important applications to quantum technologies, including computers, communication and advanced measurement.

Jeremy O'Brien, Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, together with his collaborators in Japan, has realised an entanglement filter made by combining two state of the art developments in optical technologies with single photons - a special type of mirror that is sensitive to the polarisation of light, and an optical device that enables stability at the billionths of a metre level.

More at Science and Bristol University News pages.


Making lessons interesting is a constant challenge for teachers. Physics Lecturer Henkjan Gersen fed outcomes of his research on nanotechnology - chosen for its high media profile - into a professional development programme for teachers, thereby taking cutting-edge research right into the classroom. The Science Learning Centre, based in science centre At-Bristol, provides Continued Professional Development for teachers.

Henkjan contributed to training for Key Stage 4 teachers. He reflects "It's really important that young people experience the potential applications of research today and also appreciate research timescales. Working with the SLC was a really positive experience – I'd recommend it to anyone." More on the university web site at Cutting-edge lessons.


Members of the Department of Physics' Correlated Electron Systems group, together with Dr Nic Shannon of the Theory Group, have just been awarded £105,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to carry out joint research into novel states of quantum matter in correlated oxides, with collaborators at the University of Tokyo in Japan. This grant is part of a cooperative programme between the UK and Japanese Research Councils to promote collaborative research in the area of novel electronic devices, and builds on a highly successful partnership of pioneering research at the two institutes.


Translating the Dynamic Holographic Assembler: over £1 million awarded to nanotechnology group by Research Council
The dream of nanotechnology is to assemble nanometre-scale functional structures with special properties that derive from their size. The Dynamic Holographic Assembler is a bottom-up approach in which structures are assembled using focused light beams to manipulate and position the component parts. Focused beams, or optical traps, are generated not by lenses but by a dynamic hologram, which allows the traps to be manipulated in 3D and to control a hundred or more beams simultaneously. A multitouch table interface allows these optical traps to be controlled in a very intuitive manner by simply generating and dragging them on the optical image.

One of the aims is to manipulate living cells using the optical traps and nano tools; collaborations are underway with biomedical groups working on cardiac stem cells and on cancer cells. These tools, which are fabricated in the DHA, can themselves be used to assemble/manipulate structures at an even finer level - an idea that resonates with Feynman's proposal in his seminal lecture There's plenty of Room at the Bottom. The DHA is also used for the 3D fabrication of photonic and electronic structures. Computer simulations give insights into forces and torques generated by the optical fields on component structures.

Professors Miles and Robert, and Drs Hanna and Subramanian of the University of Bristol's Departments of Physics, Biological Sciences and Computer Science, along with Professor Padgett of the University of Glasgow, have been awarded £1,069,691 for this project. This translation funding from Research Councils UK will support the development towards a commercial instrument of the multitouch DHA for biomedical applications.

More at EPSRC's Grants on the Web and more on the Dynamic Holographic Assembler.


Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials - integrated 4-year PhD studentships available
The Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials is a new Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) funded by the EPSRC, and will provide a four-year integrated PhD training programme for 10 students a year. It will have a focus on Functional Nanomaterials with an emphasis on practical real-life problems. We are seeking applications now, with our first group of students starting in October 2009. The hallmarks of our DTC will be

- An interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary training programme with world-leading academics in Chemistry, Physics and Engineering
- The opportunity to be part of a multi-skilled supportive team of students - 10 students recruited per year - who will all have the new £12 M Nanoscience Centre as their base
- Novel training protocols embedded in a world-class research environment - the 2008 RAE results confirm the Bristol Science Faculty in the top three of the UK
- Close interaction with industrialists from global companies in the key economic area of Functional Nanomaterials
- A four-year integrated PhD training programme - bespoke taught courses, practical training, exploratory projects, and your own PhD project - to provide you with all the skills to prosper as an independent researcher.

If you have, or will attain, a very good undergraduate degree in Physics, Chemistry, Engineering or Material Science, you can find more information and apply online at http://www.bcfn.bris.ac.uk/.


Results of the national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008) published today show Bristol Physics as equal 5th for 4* research, ie that classified as world leading. Assessed against 41 other Physics departments in the UK, Bristol is confirmed as having some of the best researchers in the world.

The Department is placed equal 9th in the league table of Russell Group Physics Departments. Professor Bob Evans, FRS, Head of Bristol Physics said "This is a very strong result for us and comes at a time of considerable investment and re-structuring in the Department. In the last four years alone we have hired 18 new staff of whom 13 are early career researchers. The RAE result is an excellent endorsement of our 10 year strategy to confirm Bristol as a world-leading Physics Department. I am especially proud that we entered 100% (all 46) of our eligible staff in RAE 2008."

More at Physics RAE League Table
UoB RAE news: Bristol confirmed as a world leader in research
Read the VC writing in the Guardian: Taking a punt on the future of the RAE.


At a meeting of University Court on 12 December 2008, Guy Gregory (Director of Personnel and Staff Development) presented an award to Richard Head, a Research Technician in the Particle Physics Group, marking 40 years of service in the Physics Department.


TIME magazine has named a Bristol University Physics research project in its Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of the Year 2008.

Named at No 1 is the largest scientific experiment in the world, the Large Hadron Collider. The experiment recreated conditions that existed just a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, and seeks to answer to some of the deepest mysteries of the origins and workings of our universe.

The experiment involved a worldwide team of experts, including scientists from the University's Department of Physics, who designed and constructed crucial parts of the two detectors known as the CMS and LHC. They also focused on the interpretation of the vast amount of data produced by the LHC - enough to create a 20km high tower of CDs every year, and eagerly awaited by scientists around the world.

More >>>


Professor Sir John Enderby has been appointed as Chief Scientist at Institute of Physics (IoP) Publishing. As well as acting in an advisory capacity to the journals department, his new role will also involve helping to create relationships with scientists internationally.

Emeritus Professor Sir John Enderby was Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol from 1976 to 1996. He was President of the IoP from 2004 - 6.


The Department of Physics has won funding for one of four new centres awarded to the University of Bristol, that will generate the scientists and engineers needed for Britain's future, it was announced today [5 December 2008] by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the UK funding body for science and engineering.

The Doctoral Training Centre in Functional Nanomaterials will train a new generation of scientists in the area of functional nanomaterials to connect fundamental nanoscience with real-life applications, coupled to economic and societal benefits, in the areas of healthcare, computing and pharmaceuticals.

Dr Terry McMaster, Director of the Centre, said: "The award of a DTC to the Bristol functional nanomaterials team is a landmark event for the University of Bristol, and the wider nanomaterials community in the UK. The training of a new generation of scientists in the area of functional nanomaterials is of great national urgency if robust interconnections are to be forged between fundamental nanoscience and real-life applications, and coupled to economic and societal benefits.

"Housed in the University's new £12 million Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information, each DTC student of the Bristol functional nanomaterials centre will receive state-of-the-art training, brimming with innovative elements, and will be part of, and contribute, to a world-class research environment supported by the Departments of Physics, Chemistry, and Engineering."

The centre is intrinsically interdisciplinary, and will be led by the Director (Dr Terry McMaster), Principal (Professor Stephen Mann), and co-Principal (Professor Mervyn Miles).

More at University of Bristol News Pages and at the EPSRC web site.

Professor Nigel Hussey of the Correlated Electron Systems Group and Dr Nic Shannon of the Theoretical Physics Group have been awarded an EPSRC grant of £600,000 to study how new forms of quantum order can arise in systems where no simple form of order wins outright, and the electrons are frustrated (like people!) by the bewildering array of choices they face.

The material systems which they will study are considered to be at the forefront of modern materials science, unique in their behavioural aspects. Through an exciting collaboration between experiment and theory the team hope to discover new types of electronic excitations which may go on to form the foundation of the next generation of electronic devices.

The image right shows a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional pyrochlore lattice. The red triangles show freely-moving T-junctions in chains of electrons, each of which carries a fractional charge.

The EPSRC has awarded Dr Henkjan Gersen of the Nanophysics and Soft Matter research group a three-year grant worth £550,000. Dr Gersen will develop a novel instrument with unique capabilities in measuring time-dependent optical fields in and around nanostructures with subwavelength resolution.

The instrument will combine a linear pulse characterization technique - that measures interference directly in the spectral domain - with a scanning probe technique, allowing full characterization of weak optical pulses. Because the technique used is linear, it can be used for extremely weak pulses that on average contain less than a fraction of a photon per pulse. This extreme sensitivity opens up many fascinating research avenues in coherent control, nano-optics, quantum information and other research fields that investigate the interaction between light and matter with high spatial and temporal resolution.

The image left is a time sequence: a light pulse travels through a photonic crystal imaged in the time-domain using a scanning probe technique. The bright region towards the left in the last three frames is a portion of the pulse that is nearly held stationary. From H Gersen et al, Phys Rev Lett 94, 073903 2005

A post-doctoral position is now open for application, funded via this award. For information please see http://www.bris.ac.uk/boris/jobs/ads?ID=76186. Closing date 16 January 2009.

More at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) web site Grants on the Web.

A recent award from the Hewlett Packard Open Innovation Scheme will fund a PhD studentship with Professor Rob Richardson, to investigate suspensions of nanoparticles in liquid crystals. The aim is to produce and study suspensions of nanoparticles in nematic hosts. These have potential as novel electro-optic materials. Stability of the suspensions, and their response to applied fields, will be particular interests. The suspensions will be studied using a range of experimental methods, including measurements of small angle X-ray scattering, dielectric permittivity, optical microscopy and infra-red dichroism.

The image shows a nematic containing a red pigment where it is possible to see the director defects around spherical particles.

This studentship is open for applications - see Jobs.ac.uk and application information at Postgraduate admissions.
See also Hewlett Packard's site - HP Selects 41 Professors for Innovation Research Awards in 2008.


Dr Andy Young has been awarded a Royal Society research grant to investigate how Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) - desktop supercomputers - may be used to make vast improvements to modelling and analysis speeds of astronomical X-ray observations. Modern X-ray observatories produce a large quantity of high quality data, which are often described by complex theoretical models. Fitting these computationally intensive models to the data is very time consuming.

Using massively parallel GPUs, this model fitting can be speeded up, making possible new scientific studies that would otherwise have been too computationally expensive. The grant will be used to purchase computer equipment for this study.


The development of silicon chips for optical quantum technologies has won a global award for innovation in the Institution of Engineering and Technology's (IET) annual Innovation Engineering Awards. The team at the Centre for Quantum Photonics, led by Professor Jeremy O'Brien, was named 2008 winner of the Emerging Technologies Award at a ceremony in London last week [3 November].

The Innovation Awards span 15 categories and attracted hundreds of entries from around the world. It is a unique opportunity for industry innovators to showcase their brightest ideas and highlights the importance of innovation by celebrating its application across a range of engineering disciplines.

Professor O'Brien said: "We are delighted to receive this award. Quantum information science has shown that quantum mechanical effects can dramatically improve performance for certain tasks in communication, computation and measurement. However, realising such quantum technologies is an immense challenge, owing to the difficulty in controlling quantum systems and their inherent fragility."

More at University of Bristol News Pages.


A new portrait was unveiled on Monday 10 November, to be hung in the Department of Physics. The portrait of Kathy Sykes, Professor of Sciences and Society, was presented to the University by Jane Butcher, Assistant Director at the UK Resource Centre for Women (UKRC).

Kathy was one of the first women in the UKRC's "Women of Outstanding Achievement" Photographic Exhibition. This annual collection of portraits, commissioned by the UKRC and photographed by Robert Taylor, is both a celebration and tribute to the collective and individual contribution that women are making to science, engineering and technology.

More at University of Bristol News Pages.


Can recreating the conditions a billionth of a second after the Big Bang reveal the secrets of our Universe?

The Big Bang exhibition, currently showing in @Bristol, leads you into the world of the Large Hadron Collider, probably the largest science experiment in the world. From Thursday 13 to Saturday 15 November, experts from the University of Bristol's Particle Physics Group will be on hand to further illuminate the particle world.

In addition, on the evening of Tuesday 11 November, the Big Bang exhibition will be open for a special Science Café. Dr Helen Heath, Reader in Teaching and Learning - Physics, will lead a lively discussion, encompassing the Large Hadron Collider and what we hope to learn from it.

The US Office of Naval Research (ONR) has awarded a DRIFT grant to the Department of Physics Center for Device Thermography and Reliability (CDTR) led by Professor Martin Kuball. Working with several US universities to develop new design concepts for improving GaN and GaAs power electronics and their reliability, the Bristol contribution benefits from world-leading thermal and stress analysis technology for semiconductor device analysis, Raman thermography, developed and pioneered in Bristol.
Dr Ruth Oulton has joined the Centre for Quantum Photonics in a joint post with the Departments of Physics and Electrical Engineering. She brings with her an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship, with five years of funding to study the transfer and manipulation of quantum information between light and matter. She will be working closely with Professor Jeremy O'Brien in the Department of Physics and Professor John Rarity in the Department of Electrical Engineering on their project to integrate all the components needed in an optical/solid-state quantum computer into a single optical chip.

Dr Oulton's focus of research will be on the use of solid state nanostructures, such as semiconductor quantum dots or nitrogen vacancy centres in diamond, to store a single quantum of information in terms of an initialised spin, and then to transfer this information to a single quantum of light (photon). Both photons and spins make good media for single "quantum bits" but when spin-polarized optical transitions are exploited, a more flexible and scalable system may be developed. Dr Oulton's most important task is to find the best way to store spin in the solid state, and to gain unprecedented control over spin-dependent interactions with light. She will perform experiments which shed light onto the fundamental interactions of an electron spin in a nanostructure with the semiconductor lattice's constituent nuclei, and engineer photonic devices which will allow these interactions to be precisely controlled with light. She hopes to improve the fundamental physical building blocks used in quantum information, and hopes that being able to control these interactions will lead to new uses in other diverse applications.

Read about Dr Oulton's work in online magazine The Engineer, Quantum Feat.

Anne Pawsey, a University of Bristol Physics undergraduate, attended the BA Festival of Science in Liverpool in September. Anne was awarded a student bursary to attend one of Europe's largest scientific meetings - a great opportunity to engage in current debates and meet with leading scientists. She writes: "Having a week pass was brilliant - I was able to attend lectures from Saturday afternoon until Thursday morning; the packed programme meant that this was almost continuous."

Follow the links to Anne's report, and more about the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) Festival of Science.


An international team of physicists from the University of Bristol (led by Professors Nigel Hussey and Tony Carrington), the High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Toulouse, France and the University of St Andrews has just published the results of a landmark experiment on high temperature superconductors in the prestigious journal Nature (16 October 2008). The project involved a series of high precision measurements on tiny single crystals of the exotic high temperature superconductor Tl₂Ba₂CuO₆ in ultra-high (pulsed) magnetic fields. These experiments revealed new information about the metallic state from which high temperature superconductivity emerges, information that will now help theorists to develop a more complete theory for their highly unusual metallic and superconducting properties.

The Center for Device Thermography and Reliability (CDTR) led by Professor Martin Kuball has been awarded a research grant from the European Commission Framework 7 Program AGAPAC (Advanced GaN Packaging). AGAPAC targets the development of novel high thermal conductivity materials for high-power, high-speed GaN electronics for future satellite communication. The project involves 7 partners from the UK, France, Austria, Germany and Spain. The CDTR will lead in this project the thermal, stress, and thermomechanical stress analysis and modelling of GaN devices and their packaging, using its world-leading expertise in this research area.




On Wednesday 10 September 2008, the largest scientific experiment in the world was officially started, with University of Bristol scientists at the forefront.

The experiment will recreate conditions that existed just a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, and seek answers to some of the deepest mysteries of the origins and workings of our universe.

Scientists from the Department of Physics, funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, have been working for over 15 years to help construct the new experiment, as part of a large international team. Apparatus designed and built in Bristol is now operational at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and will play a vital part when the machine is turned on.

"The experiments at the LHC are the most challenging we've ever attempted, and the results could revolutionise our understanding of nature," said Dr Dave Newbold, who works on the project. "The University also has a key role in interpreting the data, and some of the first discoveries could be made in Bristol."

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The Astrophysics Group was recently awarded a grant by STFC to support the travel of its staff members to observatories around the world. The Group makes use of ground-based radio, sub-mm, optical, and infra-red telescopes in support of its research, and while some of these facilities can be run remotely, many require an on-site observer to run the observations. Two examples of such facilities, the Australia Telescope Compact Array near Narrabri, NSW, and the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope, at La Silla, Chile, are shown.

The Group has also won a large amount of time on the Chandra satellite this cycle - something that will strongly help with our current grant allocations, and that is going to lead to a lot of papers next year.


Dr Chris Hill's research is featured in the current (19th July) issue of New Scientist magazine. The article, entitled "Messenger from the Multiverse" describes a particle physics theory called Split Supersymmetry and the quest to find evidence for this theory that is about to begin when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins operation later this year. The article reports on Hill's plans to use the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, a collaboration of 3000 physicists of which the Bristol Particle Physics Group are members, to search for long-lived gluinos that have been stopped by the CMS detector. If split superymmetry is correct, these "stopped gluinos" could decay seconds, hours, days, or even years after they were produced. Hill's idea is to search for these delayed decays at CMS when the LHC is otherwise "off". If such a decay is observed under these ideal circumstances (ideal since there are no backgrounds from "normal" physics processes) it will provide compelling evidence for Split Supersymmetry.


The department were very happy to welcome our graduating students, with their friends and families, to a reception and prize-giving on 11 July 2008. Professor Sir Michael Berry presented the prizes to the final year students and wished them all well for the future. The official graduation ceremony was held in the Great Hall of the Wills Memorial Building, followed by a garden party which had to be held in the Victoria Rooms owing to inclement weather. Here are the prize-winners in the final, and other years.

We are also delighted to send our congratulations to Christopher Rastall who has been awarded the prestigious Alumni Academic Achievement Award - for the outstanding first year performance in the Faculty of Science.


Andrew Lang had many friends and colleagues in the department and, of course, in the wider international scientific community. We are saddened at his death on 30 June 2008 and will miss him. One of his early students, Moreton Moore, has written a brief biography for the 2008 Diamond Conference to be held in Oxford next week and he has permitted us to reproduce it here.

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Peter Barham and his colleagues from Bristol and Capetown, are presenting research on their Penguin Recognition Project at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.

See: http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945408.html


The group has been awarded £39K to continue its work on the Global Calorimeter Trigger system for the CMS detector at the LHC. This a key component of the state-of-the-art experiment at CERN, and processes each of the 40 million collision events per second to determine which may be useful for further analysis. The CMS experiment begins collision-mode operations later this year, and the group is also at the forefront of preparations for analysis of the resulting data. The experiment is designed to uncover evidence for the Higgs mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, and to investigate the new physical laws which are believe to apply at energy scales of 1TeV and above. The grant will support Dr Rob Frazier (pictured) in his work to complete the complex software framework which controls and monitors the trigger system. Dr Dave Newbold and Professor Greg Heath have been leading participants in the design and construction of this apparatus since 1993, and the new grant will allow the final components to be put in place and tested before the LHC collision rate begins to ramp up.


Dr. Tony Carrington and Professor Nigel Hussey have been awarded an EPSRC grant worth £550,000 to study the Fermiology of high temperature superconductors. The project will follow on from the recent breakthroughs in the study of the electronic structure of these important materials, which have resulted from the first successful observation of quantum oscillations and angle dependent magnetoresistance oscillations. The project will involve the growth and characterisation of ultra high purity samples and measurements at the world's highest magnetic field laboratories in Toulouse and Tallahassee.


Malcolm Bremer has received a £339K grant from STFC to enable him to continue his highly successful work on the formation and evolution of the earliest galaxies, typically seen when the Universe was less than 10 per cent of its current age and at the greatest distances from us. The purpose of this work is to understand the key processes that govern how galaxies form in the young Universe and how they influence the rest of the Universe. Dr Bremer has already identified the largest sample of strongly star forming galaxies securely confirmed to be at these great distances and with this new grant, he and his co-workers will use these galaxies as sensitive probes of the young Universe in order to understand their part in and influence on the evolution of the Universe.


A collaboration involving Mark Dennis of the Theory Group has been awarded an EPSRC Basic Technology grant to develop an optical 'nanoscope': a new non-invasive optical imaging technology. Conventional optical methods have difficulty in resolving very small objects - such as structures within biological cells - due to the diffraction limit of traditional lenses. The principle of the nanoscope is to go beyond this limit, achieving super-resolution using the principle of superoscillation, for both propagating waves and plasmon waves on metal surfaces (as in the figure). Superoscillation is a surprising effect which occurs in superpositions of waves, where a small part of the superposition can oscillate much faster than the waves being added. The new work follows from recent research by Professors Michael Berry and Sandu Popescu in the Theory Group on propagating superoscillatory functions in optics and quantum mechanics. The nanoscope collaboration involves researchers at the Universities of Southampton and St Andrews and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.


We offer many congratulations to Professor Sir Michael Berry FRS and Professor John Steeds FRS on their recently awarded Emeritus Fellowships by The Leverhulme Trust.


A proposal, led by Professor Malcolm Anderson and with co-investigators Heinrich Hoerber and Mervyn Miles, has been successful in obtaining funding from an EPRSC-led programme 'Nanoscience through Nano-engineering to Application'; this is an initiative to facilitate access to strategically important equipment for the benefit of high quality nano-related research programmes to ensure better use of existing equipment and expertise. The project, funded at £228K for two years, with a possible extension to four years, will provide 'free' access to two highly specialised microscopy techniques that are being developed to support the study and manipulation of nanoscale structures. From the beginning of the project in September they will be housed in the new 'state of the art' interdisciplinary facility of the NSQI building.


The award of Best Paper was made to Professor Kuball's group at ISTFA 2007. The International Symposium for Testing and Failure Analysis symposium is the leading forum on semiconductor device failure and reliability analysis and took place in Silicon Valley, California in December 2007. Professor Kuball's group presented work on novel thermal characterization of semiconductor devices and technology, based on Raman scattering spectroscopy. The award includes an invitation to present this work also at IPFA (International Symposium on the Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits) in Singapore in July 2008.


The Philip Leverhulme Prizes are awarded to outstanding younger scholars who have made a substantial and recognised contribution to their particular field of study, recognised at an international level, and whose future contributions are held to be of correspondingly high promise. Jeremy said "I am greatly honoured to receive a Philip Leverhulme Prize for this work and prize money will allow me to pursue research into quantum technologies that operate at the interface between light and matter."

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The CLEO-c experiment at Cornell University is a collaboration with very limited manpower resources to analyse many of the channels that are most important for gamma measurements at B-physics experiments. Jonas Rademacker's proposal to join CLEO-c to spearhead these studies has been successful in obtaining funding from STFC. Since joining the collaboration, the CLEO-c management has been sufficiently impressed by his group's contributions to the experiment that they have now been made full members. The project concludes with the application of the results to gamma measurements at LHCb, which will start data taking this year.

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Two Physics Masterclasses are being held in the department this week, organised by the Particle Physics Group and attended by students and teachers from the south west region.

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Ian Lindsay, a member of the Nanophysics and Soft Matter Group, has been awarded a Marie Curie European Reintegration Grant to support his research into localised infrared spectroscopy of nanostructured materials. These grants are awarded to researchers who have previously carried out a Marie Curie fellowship in another EU member state and the award will provide additional support to the EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship that brought Ian to Bristol in October 2007.

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Steve Phillipps has been successful with a grant application entitled, "Dwarf galaxies in the Hubble space telescope Coma Cluster Treasury Survey" which was approved by the Leverhulme Trustees at their March 2008 meeting. Galaxies are often referred to as the building blocks of the universe. For this reason, astronomers have constantly sought, firstly, to enumerate and classify them and, secondly, to understand how the various types of galaxy came to have the forms that we observe. An important strategy is to explore galaxy clusters, where hundreds or thousands of galaxies are found in a (cosmologically) small volume of space.

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The Department offers many congratulations to Radu Coldea on the award of this prize by The Neutron Scattering Group of The Institute of Physics and the Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The prize is named in honour of the founding chairman of the Neutron Scattering Group, Professor B T M Willis, and is awarded for outstanding neutron scattering science. Radu will deliver the Willis Prize lecture at the Neutron and Muon User Meeting in Nottingham this week.




Dr Oksana Kasyutich and Professor Walther Schwarzacher have been awarded a 3-year EPSRC grant worth more than £400000 to develop novel nano-materials. They will make metal and oxide particles only a few nanometres in diameter and arrange them into periodic 3-dimensional arrays using a new method based on protein crystallization. Their arrays are expected to have interesting and useful magnetic and optical properties, very different from those of conventional materials. Each of the crystals shown in the image is a periodic 3-D array of magnetic nanoparticles formed by growing an iron oxide core inside an empty protein shell and subsequently crystallizing the protein.        
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Our congratulations to Ruth Jackson, one of our final year students, who has been elected to the post of UBU Vice-President (Welfare) 2008-2009. We all wish her well in her tenure of the post.




The Nanophysics and Particle Physics Groups from the Department of Physics took part in Science Alive! held in the Galleries, Broadmead on the 7 and 8 March 2008. This was part of the University's contribution to the National Science and Engineering Week, a biennial event which gives members of the public the opportunity to participate in science and technology activities throughout the country. The general view was that there was positive interaction with the demonstrations undertaken by both groups, particularly by the children, and that it was considered a successful event.
The AstroGrid project is building software to find, display, and analyze astronomical data from the so-called Virtual Observatory archived observations distributed in many sites around the world. The Bristol Astrophysics Group has been awarded an STFC grant to continue work on this project.

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Dr. Adrian Barnes has been awarded an 4-year EPSRC grant to investigate the structure of high-temperature oxide liquids and the mechanisms through which they form glasses. The work will involve the development of diffraction experiments using in-situ aerodynamic levitation and laser heating methods at the national and international neutron and X-ray scattering facilities (such as the ILL, ESRF, DIAMOND and ISIS). With these experiments we hope to make progress in answering some outstanding questions concerning the nature of the glass transition, poly-amorphism in glass forming systems, the optical properties of rare earth oxide glasses (used as phosphors and glasses for lasers) and the origins of liquid-liquid phase transitions.

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An international incoming fellowship from the Royal Society has enabled Dr. Yue Wang, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, to come to the department to work on a project, entitled "Superconductivity and the electronic ground state of overdoped high temperature superconductors" with Professor Nigel Hussey. High temperature superconductors are materials composed of copper oxide layers and represent one of the most challenging mysteries of modern solid state physics. Not only do their superconducting transition temperatures appear to surpass conventional expectations, their electronic state is highly anomalous. During his stay, Dr. Wang will be investigating the electrical transport properties of a series of high quality single crystals with the aim of searching for a possible smoking-gun experiment that may help to identify the scattering mechanism responsible for this anomalous behaviour and the interaction most likely to cause superconductivity itself.


The Department offer warm congratulations to two members of staff who have been recipients of teaching and leaning awards in the Science Faculty for 2007/08. Dr. Helen Heath received the Teaching and Learning Prize and Dr. Adrian Barnes the new E-Learning Award. The prizes were presented at the University Teaching and Learning Exhibition on Tuesday 8th January 2008.
Dr Dave Newbold and Professor Nick Brook have been awarded a £95k grant by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, to allow use of the new Bristol High-Performance Computer system for LHC data analysis. The LHC particle collider at CERN, Geneva, will begin operation next year, and is expected to rapidly allow new discoveries at an energy scale not previously penetrated.

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A successful application by Professor Martin Kuball, has resulted in a Commonwealth Fellowship for Professor V Ramakrishan, Head of Laser Studies in the School of Physics, Madurai Kamaraj University, India. Professor Ramakrishan is visiting the department for a period of six months to work with the Applied Spectroscopy Group.
Professor James Annett and Professor Balazs Gyorffy have been awarded an EPSRC grant for theoretical investigations of the proximity effects between ferromagnetic and superconducting materials. The grant is linked with corresponding experimental projects at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London and Royal Holloway College, and the total funding for these projects is over £900,000. The Bristol part of the project will focus on the theoretical aspects, and involve theory and computing to model new spin transport effects in the ferromagnet/superconductor interface region.

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We are pleased to announce the appointment of three new lecturers, two in the field of Astrophysics and one a member of the Theoretical Physics group.

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Walther Schwarzacher's inaugural lecture, "Electrodeposition: past, present and future", held in the department on 22 November 2007, was well-attended by an audience which included family, friends and many members of University staff. Professor Andrew Lang, a long-time academic colleague, has written a report on the subject of Walther's lecture.

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Phase 1 of Project Phi was completed in time for the start of the academic year and on the 26 November 2007 Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Selby Knox formally opened our splendid new undergraduate laboratories. These teaching laboratories are arranged so that students, as they progress through their degree programmes, will experience a wide range of different experimental techniques and learn to use a variety of specialist equipment. The laboratories are arranged primarily in an open plan format so that students in earlier years can see what they will be doing over the coming years. More >>>

Project Phi is a major investment in, and refurbishment of, the H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory. It is a £45 million project scheduled to take a total of 6-8 years to complete and involves refurbishment of all levels of the building. Completion of this first phase provides excellent facilities and working conditions for both students and staff in the department.
In Search of Perfection (27 November 2007 on BBC2) started in New York and ended in our laboratories; it showed the world-famous chef working with Peter Barham to produce the perfect Baked Alaska. Visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/tv_and_radio/perfection/about_index.shtml for more information.


Professor Martin Kuball, and his collaborator Dr. Michael Wang from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Sheffield, have been awarded an EPSRC grant for an exploratory project to develop novel UV laser diodes. This project builds on semiconductor device and device thermography expertise of the Applied Spectroscopy Group in Bristol (http://spectra.phy.bris.ac.uk) and semiconductor growth and device expertise in Sheffield; it is intended that this collaborative work will provide the basis for further grant applications in the future. These new devices will have great potential for biological detection and medical applications.

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The wet and windy weather on graduation day did not dampen the enjoyment of our students, their families and friends when they attended the graduation ceremony in the Great Hall of the Wills Memorial Building. It was then a pleasure to welcome them all to the department for a glass of wine and presentation of the final year prizes by Professor Michael Springford, a former Head of the Physics Department. We wish all the graduates success in their future endeavours.

Here are the prizewinners in the final, and other years.


Neil Fox, Gareth Fuge and Suz Furkert (joint School of Chemistry and Department of Physics) have won the second prize of £ 5,000 for their device Light Materials Ltd. Light Materials is a new type of solar energy-to-electricity converter which is cheaper to produce and easier to operate than those currently available. The device will enable systems to generate electricity for homes and businesses. The converter also has the potential to be used in large numbers in concentrated solar power stations, that are beginning to be built in the "sun belt" countries.

As well as securing the £ 5,000 prize, Light Materials also won the Timms-Smith Award for best chemistry entry. The Timms-Smith Award, which is supported by BOC Edwards, aims to recognise the achievements of Dr Peter Timms and Bob Smith whose scientific collaborations over many years led to the commercialisation of a gas abatement system for purifying waste gas streams.

The prize was awarded to the researchers at the University's annual enterprise dinner held on the 3 July.

The successful team are pictured at a recent conference with one of their collaborators, Dr Shigo Itoh of the Futaba Corporation.


EPSRC have awarded a grant to Jeremy O'Brien, Senior Research Fellow jointly in Physics and Electronic Engineering, for research on Photonic Quantum Technologies, as part of the Challenge Engineering programme. This project plans to realise each of the building blocks for photonic quantum technologies - technologies which harness quantum mechanics for vastly improved performance. Single particles of light - photons - are ideal for storing quantum information, but as yet high efficiency single photon sources, detectors and circuits have not been realised. The work will integrate each of these components on a single optical chip. His partners in this project include NPL, HP and QinetiQ.

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We would like to welcome Dr Jaap Velthuis to Bristol as he joins the department as a lecturer and as a member of the Particle Physics group. Jaap obtained his PhD in the ZEUS group at NIKHEF (Amsterdam) under the supervision of Jos Engelen, Paul Kooijman and Els Koffeman. During his postgraduate study he worked on the ZEUS microvertex detector, where he took part in the testing and characterization of the silicon sensors and readout electronics with a special focus on radiation damage effects. His thesis was completed with a study of strangeness production in electron-proton collisions. After leaving ZEUS his research has been focussed on detector development for the Linear Collider Vertex detector. He joined the University of Liverpool on a Marie Curie Fellowship, where he worked on the development of Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors. Jaap joins us from the University of Bonn, Germany where he worked with a Humboldt Fellowship on the development of DEPFETs.
Dr Jeremy O'Brien, is to participate in the Crucible programme, an interdisciplinary gathering, spread over three weekends, and intended to stimulate innovation.

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Professor Rob Richardson, and his collaborators, Professor H Zimmermann of the Max Plank Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg and Professor L Komitov of Goteberg University, have been successful in obtaining an EPSRC grant worth over £100,000. for research into the structure at homeotropic liquid crystal surfaces. The project will use neutron reflection and spectroscopic ellipsometry to determine the surface structure of liquid crystals. The neutron reflection will be done at the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble and at the ISIS Neutron Source, Oxfordshire and the ellipsometry at Bristol University. Interactions between solid surfaces and nematics play an essential part in most applications of liquid crystals. The aim of the project is to understand these interactions at a molecular level. More >>>

Cartoon of possible structure at a nematic/air interface showing a thin layer of enhanced nematic order and a thicker layer of enhanced smectic order.

Congratulations to Bethan White, one of our final year MSci students, on winning a prize in the 2006 Essay Competition, the second such event organised by the Environmental Physics Group of the Institute of Physics. Bethan's essay was entitled "Physics in the Current Climate", and gave a succinct overview of the crucial role of physicists in global climatic modelling. Publication of the winning essays was a key objective when the competition was set-up and negotiations with Physics Education are at an advanced stage in getting the latest winners into print. The prize winners were invited to present their work at the Members' Day on 2 May 2007 when they received their certificates and prizes.


Fred Dulwich has won the poster competition at the 2007 National Astronomy Meeting, held at Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Central Lancashire, following a similar success at their 2005 Meeting. The competition was open to posters whose first author was a postgraduate student at a UK university and was run under the auspices of the RAS Higher Education Committee. It attracted an abundance of posters and the judges looked for an entry that was striking, but not cluttered, had a good balance between text and illustrations, and a clear path for the reader to follow through the information. The winning 2007 poster was entitled Multi-band Imaging and Polarimetry of Kiloparsec-scale Jet Emission in Nearby Active Galaxies. More >>>


Dr Nic Shannon is hosting a visit by Stephen Williams MP as part of an MP-Scientist pairing scheme organised by the Royal Society.

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Jeff Odell has been awarded £300,000. from EPSRC to undertake research in Complex Fluids in Microscopic Flows. The total three-year project is funded at £600,000 with effect from April 2007 and involves close collaborations with Xue-Feng Yuan of the Interdisciplinary Biocentre and Stephen Yeats of the School of Chemistry at the University of Manchester, and with Arnold Kamp at Linkam Scientific Instruments Limited.    More >>>

Left: Polymer molecules stretching in a cross-slot microchannel flow (10 parts per million solution).
PPARC has awarded Professor Mark Birkinshaw and Professor Diana Worrall approximately £320K in grants to support work on the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (the scattering of the microwave background radiation by hot gas in clusters of galaxies), and on the nature of X-ray sources detected by the XMM-Newton satellite. The projects are expected to yield new information about the rates at which clusters of galaxies form and evolve, and the population of super-massive black holes in the distant Universe.

More XMM pictures


The Department is delighted to congratulate Professor Stephen M Hayden who has been awarded a prestigious five-year Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. These awards are jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Office of Science and Technology. About 25 awards are made each year to scientists of outstanding ability and potential. Professor Paul Valdes (Geographical Sciences) has also won an award in this round.


Professor Bob Evans has been awarded the Lennard-Jones Prize and Lectureship of the Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry Faraday Division. Bob will deliver his lecture at the 'Thermodynamics 2007' conference to be held near Paris, in September 2007. Colleagues will recall that J. E. Lennard-Jones was the first professor of theoretical physics in Bristol.
Imagine lowering a house down a 100m shaft with only a 20cm gap between the walls of the shaft and the house. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN achieved this feat on Wednesday 28th February as the largest and most important piece of this enormous experiment was successfully lowered into position. The Department of Physics at Bristol has been involved in the preparations for this experiment for over 14 years. Once in place the detector will look at the products of proton-proton collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in order to investigate the smallest particles that make up the Universe. At the heart of the experiment is a large cylindrical magnet 12m long and 6m in diameter which is capable of generating a magnetic field 100,000 times stronger than that of the earth. It is this 2000 tonne magnet that will be making its way underground this week. The experiment is due to see the first collisions at the end of this year and staff and students in our Particle Physics research group will be closely involved with the analysis of data.

For views of the construction take a look at the CMS eye cameras:

http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cms/outreach/html/cmseye/index.html. http://cmsinfo.cern.ch/outreach/temp/YB0/index.html

Nick Grant (Bristol Postgraduate Student) watches one of the smaller sections of the experiment being lowered down the shaft. Another section of the experiment can be seen in the background. >>>

Also see http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2007/5315.html


The Physics Department congratulates postgraduate student Liz Ainsbury who has been awarded the Very Early Career Woman Physicist of the Year Award for 2006. This is a new award sponsored by HSBC. Applicants were judged on their current research work and on their contribution to encouraging others into Physics. Liz has been working on the measurement of magnetic fields in the environment and the possible health consequences of such fields. Liz will receive her prize of £1,000 at the Institute of Physics on February 28th.
Professor David Dingley, a Visiting Professor in this department, will be honoured at the Royal Microscopical Society EBSD meeting in March 2007. The first day of this three-day meeting is dedicated to David achievements and will celebrate his contributions to the development and application of EBSD and related techniques. Many of you will remember David as a lecturer in the department and a member of the Microstructures Group for a number of years. He left in the mid-1990s when he co-founded TexSEM Laboratories (TSL) in Utah with Brent Adams of the Brigham Young University. Brent will be one of the speakers at the David Dingley Day, together with three ex-Bristol PhD students who were supervised by David during his time in Bristol.
DR HELEN FRANCESCA ELLOWAY has been awarded an OBE for Medical Services with the Church Mission Society in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Francesca Elloway joined the department of Physics with as an undergraduate student in 1971 and remained after graduation to undertake a PhD with Dr (now Professor) Ted Atkins. Francesca successfully completed her postgraduate theses, entitled X-ray fibre diffraction studies of a variety of animal, plant and bacterial polysaccharides, and was awarded her PhD in 1977. Her work continued within the group as a research assistant until she left in 1979 to take up a post at Keele University. Professor Atkins expressed his delight at the honour bestowed upon Dr Elloway and has written some background information to her stay in Bristol. More >>>
A collaboration between Professor Walther Schwarzacher in the Physics Department at the University of Bristol, Professor Mathias Brust at the University of Liverpool, Professor S. Sampath of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Dr. B. L. V. Prasad of the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune have been awarded a UK-India Education and Research Initiative Grant of £110,000 to produce magnetic nano-particles with a thin shell of gold, to which bio-molecules are attached. Applications include diagnostics, cancer therapy and magnetic imaging. This prestigious grant was one of a number recently announced by the Rt Hon Gordon Brown, MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and will support regular exchanges of senior staff, researchers and postgraduate students between India and the UK over the next three years. More >>>
Dr Henkjan Gersen joins the department as a lecturer and member of the Nanophysics and Soft Matter Group. Henkjan obtained his PhD at the Applied Optics Group of the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology at The University of Twente in The Netherlands under the supervision of Kobus Kuipers and Niek van Hulst. During his postgraduate study he worked on locally visualizing short light pulses while they propagate inside a photonic crystal structure. As the critical dimensions of a photonic crystal are below the wavelength of light, scanning probe based techniques are needed to beat the diffraction limit. The group demonstrated how a scanning probe technique is able to directly address the functional heart of photonic crystal devices with high spatial and temporal resolution. Henkjan comes to us from the group of Flemming Besenbacher at Aarhus University, Denmark where he worked with a personal Marie Curie Fellowship to investigate light driven motion of molecules on metal surfaces investigated by scanning tunnelling microscopy under ultrahigh vacuum conditions.
PPARC has awarded a £3.65m grant to the Particle Physics group at the University of Bristol. Professor Nick Brook, the Head of the Particle Physics group, commented "This is excellent news. The grant coupled with recent new academic appointments will allow the group at Bristol to be at the frontier of fundamental research that uses state-of-the-art instruments to explore the outer reaches of our understanding of the universe. The grant will ensure that we will be at the forefront on the analysis of the data from the new collider at CERN, (LHC) and make a major contribution to the International Linear Collider vertex detection capability." More >>>
A new helium liquefier has arrived at the Department of Physics as part of a £600k project to modernise and enlarge the cryogenic facility. The AirLiquide liquefier is the first of its kind in a British university and is capable of producing 15 litres of liquid helium an hour. This capacity is due to a new design of 'static gas turbines' that are no bigger than a match and spin at ~10,000 revolutions per second.

This investment will allow the facility to keep pace with the ever increasing demand of liquid cryogens, not only from Physics but other departments within the University as well as local colleges and schools.

The Cryogenic Manager, Mr Bob Wiltshire, expects the new facility to be fully commissioned and operational by the end of February 2007.
Many animals carry unique patterns. We have our fingerprints, every zebra has a different pattern of stripes, no two leopards carry exactly the same spots, even ants can be distinguished by the pattern of pits in the cuticles on their backs. So, in principle, biologists can identify all the individuals of a particular species simply by remembering these patterns. This is fine for a small number of individuals, but to identify many thousand individuals an automated process is required. However, it is no simple matter to find and extract patterns and turn them into numbers that can be used as unique identifiers. A University of Bristol team, led by physicist and penguin enthusiast, Professor Peter Barham (together with Computer Vision expert Dr Neill Campbell, biologist Professor Innes Cuthill and Tilo Burghardt, the PhD student who makes it all work) have secured funding of £159k from the Leverhulme Foundation to further develop their work to create a fully automated recognition system. More >>>
EPSRC have awarded a grant of £36k to Dr Adrian Barnes to enable continued research into a current aerodynamic levitation system. By suspending materials in a vertical gas jet it is possible to maintain molten materials at very high temperatures without the need for a sample container. This grant will enable Dr Barnes, and Lawrie Skinner, his PhD student, to work towards their main aims of developing systems for measuring the electrical properties of the liquids and for very rapidly measuring the temperature of the sample by pyrometry, and to produce new glasses for study using this apparatus. More >>>
Professor Peter Barham has been appointed to the post of Visiting Professor of Molecular Gastronomy at The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University of Denmark (KVL), Copenhagen. The post is initially for two years and will involve Peter spending a week or two every other month in Copenhagen, setting up research projects and postgraduate taught courses jointly with academics at KVL, other Danish Universities and research institutes and, of course, here in Bristol. He will be attempting to write a definition of the "new science of molecular gastronomy" which he hopes will act as a sort of manifesto to attract other researchers and to define the syllabus of a new taught masters course at KVL.
The University has signed a contract with Willmott Dixon Construction to build the new Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information (NSQI) adjoining the H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory. The NSQI facility, which is due to open in autumn 2007, will be used to study and build structures at the scale of nanometres. It will house some of the quietest laboratories in the world, setting new standards for a noise-free environment and attracting nanoscience researchers from several different departments in the University.

The concept of the NSQI owes much to Professor Mervyn Miles, Head of the Nanostructures Group in Physics and Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Nanotechnology in Bristol. Mervyn and his colleagues are delighted to see construction begin! More >>>
At a very hot Degree Ceremony on 18th July 2006 Sir John Enderby received an honorary DSc (Doctor of Science) from the University of Bristol. Sir Michael Berry, the Orator, gave a splendid account of John's numerous contributions to physics and chemistry and to the general scientific community through his work on committees and with learned societies. More >>>
Dr Stephen Dugdale and Professor Ashraf Alam have been awarded a grant of £654k by the EPSRC to construct a new high-resolution positron annihilation spectrometer to look at the Fermi surface in a variety of systems. Positrons (the anti particle of electrons) are fired into matter and annihilate with electrons. By detecting the gamma rays produced, it is possible to measure the electron velocities in the sample under review. The new spectrometer will take advantage of advances in detector physics to improve significantly its resolution. The systems to be studied range from superconductors to technologically-important alloys.
Dr Martin Kuball's group has been awarded a £400k grant from EPSRC for research on novel boron-rich icosahedral semiconductors, to advance the synthesis and characterization of these materials. This project is following an NSF - EPSRC call for joint proposals for collaborative materials research between the USA and the UK, and will be performed in collaboration with Professor Edgar's and Professor Dudley's group, at Kansas State University and SUNY Stony Brook in the USA. This novel material class is attractive for applications such as high temperature as well as space electronics, neutron detectors, thermoelectronics and betavoltaic cells. Its properties lie at the extremes in many categories such as high melting temperatures, hardness, and Seebeck coefficients.
Professor Bob Evans has been appointed Head of Department in Physics. Bob Evans, PhD, FInstP, FRS is Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol. His career spans 39 years at the University where he has earned an international reputation working on condensed matter theory, especially the statistical physics of liquids and interfaces. Bob takes up his new role at the start of the 2006 summer term.
Project Phi gets the go ahead! At its meeting on Friday 17th March, the University Council approved the plans for a major Physics Investment programme. Project Φ will involve complete refurbishment of the existing H.H. Wills Physics laboratory, involving an expenditure of some £45m over the next seven years. The University had already granted approval for the refurbishment of the undergraduate teaching laboratories and these are on schedule to open in October 2007.
EPSRC has awarded a £0.5 million grant to a research team led by Dr Martin Kuball for research in collaboration with Professor Asenov at the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Glasgow. The key thrust of the grant, to commence in April/May 2006, is the development of time-resolved ultrahigh spatial resolution thermal imaging. This technique will be essential not only for achieving better reliability of next-generation solid state devices, but also for gaining a superior understanding of device physics, on timescales not experimentally accessible to date. Who wants a solid state device such as used in radars to fail in an aircraft while it is flying? Developments in Bristol and Glasgow will help to reduce such risk. The grant is based on pioneering work in Bristol on the development of ultrahigh spatial resolution DC thermal imaging of solid state devices.
Dr Malcolm Bremer has been awarded a three-year grant of nearly £150,000 by PPARC to study the properties of the most distant galaxies. A major goal of modern astrophysics is to understand how galaxies formed. Central to this is the need to explore the earliest stages of galaxy formation. In the past few years Dr Bremer and collaborators have pioneered the techniques needed to discover galaxies so distant that their light was emitted when the Universe was less than 10% of its present age. These young galaxies (like those pictured on the right) are undergoing the first large-scale bursts of star formation in the history of the Universe, and are the building blocks from which galaxies like our own were assembled. The grant allows Dr Bremer to continue to discover ever more distant galaxies and to carry out detailed multi-wavelength studies of them in order to determine the details of early galaxy formation.