As Buckingham Palace today announces the death of Prince Philip aged 99, our archivist, Professor Stephen Blundell describes a recorded visit to the Department of Physics on 4 November 1960.

‘The Clarendon archive contains several documents describing the detailed arrangements for Prince Philip’s visit to the Department of Physics, part of an Oxford day out for the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, and in reading them one gets the sense of a different age, where protocol and deference were very much the order of the day.

The Fermilab Muon g−2 experiment has released its first results showing the muon magnetic dipole moment differs from the theoretical prediction by a significant margin, confirming the results of an earlier experiment. This might be a sign of new phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

The LHCb collaboration has revealed strengthening evidence for a violation of lepton universality in B-mesons decaying to a kaon plus a pair of leptons, electrons compared to muons. This B→Kl⁺l^- decay requires the rare, flavour-changing neutral current transition, b→sl⁺l^-, which is well acknowledged for potential sensitivity to the influence of unknown physics.

As the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) reveals more details about its so-called ‘near detector’ at Fermilab, we take a look at what it is and what it might mean for physics.

On 8 December 2016, an electron antineutrino with an energy of 6300 TeV hurtled to Earth from a cosmic accelerator. Deep inside the ice sheet at the South Pole, it smashed into an electron and produced a massive particle that quickly decayed. This interaction was captured by a kilometre-sized 'telescope' buried in the Antarctic glacier – the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

Professor Philip Burrows has been working with UK company TMD Technologies to design key elements of a next-generation electron-positron collider at CERN. Professor Burrows leads the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) Collaboration which is preparing the design of the collider that could serve as a ‘factory’ for mass-producing Higgs bosons. Such a Higgs factory has been identified by the global particle physics community as its top priority for a next-generation subatomic particle collider facility.

Today, UKRI announced the launch of the Quantum Technologies for Fundamental Physics (QTFP) programme that will support scientists using quantum technology to study the universe in new ways in order to determine the nature of dark matter, detect gravitational waves and study the physics of black holes. Professor Ian Shipsey is Head of the Department of Physics at Oxford and has championed the programme since its inception: