Oxford’s Department of Physics along with Swansea University and Imperial College London have been awarded £6 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to drive next-generation solar technology into new applications.

The Department of Physics was recognised in the Vice-Chancellor's Innovation Awards this year coming highly commended in both the ‘team work’ and ‘building capacity’ categories.

A group of researchers from the Department of Physics at Oxford University are working on ways to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. The group, led by Dr Nicole Robb and Professor Achillefs Kapanidis, are working on the development of ultrafast COVID-19 diagnostic tests, as well as using computational modelling to study virus reinfection dynamics.

Professor Séamus Davis from Oxford’s Department of Physics has been awarded the Olli V Lounasmaa Memorial Prize 2020. The prize is awarded once every four years to a scientist who has made outstanding contributions to advances on low temperature physics and related fields and is named in honour of the founder of the Low Temperature Laboratory at Aalto University.

Researchers from the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have managed to drive a prototypical antiferromagnet into a new magnetic state using terahertz frequency light. Their groundbreaking method produced an effect orders of magnitude larger than previously achieved, and on ultrafast time scales. The team’s work has just been published in Nature Physics.

Professor Sonia Contera’s book, Nano comes to life, is a study of how and why nanotechnology is transforming medicine and the future of biology and, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic is the subject of a workshop at the European Parliament.

The Department of Physics is delighted to welcome eight new Associate Professor Tutorial Fellows to its academic staff.

‘We are thrilled to be joined by such fantastic new colleagues,’ enthuses Professor Ian Shipsey, Head of Department. ‘Each one brings with them their rich experience, cutting-edge research and insightful teaching practice. As leading experts in their fields, the entire department is very excited for what the future holds. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the search committees for their excellent work in identifying such exceptional talent.’

Oxford's Department of Physics is pleased to announce a Horizon 2020 Grant for perovskite-based lighting, wearables and fabric devices with LiFi and photovoltaic capability has been approved and started 1 April 2020.

The EU H2020-funded project PeroCUBE aims at developing flexible, lightweight perovskite-based electronics, creating new commercial opportunities for the lighting, energy and telecom industries. The consortium brings together 14 industrial and academic partners from 10 European countries.