Quantum information leaks away from a muon implanted in a fluoride crystal

A team from the Department of Physics at Oxford University has observed the decoherence process that occurs within quantum mechanical systems. Despite the many potential advantages of quantum computation, the integrity of any quantum mechanical system is vulnerable to interactions with its environment which cause any stored information to be slowly lost – decoherence.

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.

Name: Dr Adam Wright
Job title: Junior Research Fellow, Mansfield College

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 Professor Achillefs Kapanidis and Nicole Robb, 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.