Congratulations to Luke Ceurvorst who recently won the best poster prize at the 44th IoP Plasma Physics Conference on channelling results from OMEGA EP.

Friday, 24th February 2017 at 15:30

Physics Colloquia Series – Astor Lecture

Plasma physics helps in establishing an upper bound for the photon mass
Dr. Dmitri D. Ryutov
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Tuesday, 7 March 2017 at 14.00

‘The applied side of Bell nonlocality’
Friday, 17 February 2017 at 15:30

It is with great sorrow that we mourn Edmund 'Ted' Wilson, who died on November 3rd 2016 after a short illness.

Ted was born on 18 March 1938 in Liverpool, the son of school teacher John Wesley Wilson and nurse Anna Wilson. He was a great accelerator physicist and an inspired and inspiring teacher. He was an engaging and entertaining companion, being one of those people who, while being quite serious about everything, never take themselves too seriously; he lived life to the full, doing as much good as he could along the way.

The early 1960s witnessed a wealth of elementary particles described in terms of simple combinations of a few more elementary units, dubbed quarks. The known mesons and baryons could all be described as states of quark-antiquark or three quarks. However, it was not understood why certain more elaborate combinations, such as (two quarks + two antiquarks) or (four quarks + one antiquark) had not been observed. It has taken nearly half a century, but these "exotic" particles are now beginning to be seen and understood.

The gamma-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum probes some of the most extreme environments in the Universe. Photons of these very-high energies can only be produced by the interactions of subatomic particles that have been accelerated to almost the speed of light. This acceleration occurs in a surprisingly wide variety of astrophysical sources: close to black holes and neutron stars, in the blast waves of supernova explosions, and in the relativistic jets of active galaxies.

From the earliest commercial production of electronic image sensors for television in the 1950s, to the diverse application of specialist silicon image sensors for the Hubble space Telescope to digital dentistry this talk will outline the manufacturing technology and changes through 60 years at e2v. Somewhat surprisingly, there are today lessons to be learned, and technologies to be applied from this to the emerging new platform technology of ultra-cold atom sensing and metrology.

Janus particles are micro- or nano-scale particles whose surfaces have two or more distinct physical properties. Such asymmetry results in interesting self-assembly properties, but homogeneous Janus particles can be difficult to synthesize. The protein BslA (Bacterial Surface Layer A) is a small (~4 nm) protein produced by the bacterium Bacillus subtilis that has a hydrophilic ‘body’ to which is appended a surface-exposed hydrophobic ‘cap’.