The John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science is expanding, with a new research base at Imperial College London joining two existing centres at Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Oxford.

The Department of Physics has been granted an Athena Swan Bronze Award.

For further details, please see the full Story at www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/athena-swan.

The beliefs underpinning the Athena Swan Charter are:

Summer 2012

Our latest Department newsletter is now available to download in PDF format here. Have a look at the wide range of work that we do in front-line research, teaching, public outreach and school education. We would welcome contributions to future newsletters from undergraduate or postgraduate alumni and previous members of the physics department.

STFC have announce the 2012 round of Ernest Rutherford Fellowships. These are prestigious 5 year fellowships which may be held in any of the science areas supported by STFC. See oxford physics opportunities for further details about applying to hold one of these fellowships here.

University of Oxford physicists working both at CERN and in Oxford are today celebrating their part in the discovery of a new particle. An excess of collision events has been observed by both the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN. The signals are consistent with those expected from the long-anticipated Higgs boson. Each experiment has separately observed a "5-sigma" excess, meeting the gold standard of confidence in discovery of a new particle.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics.

Katherine Blundell has been awarded the Bragg Medal "For promoting engagement in and learning of physics both by carrying research in astronomy into schools in developing countries and by helping graduate students and postdocs in the UK to talk to schoolchildren about their science."

Oxford University Computing Services' OxTALENT program has awarded First Prize in the Student IT Innovation category to Mihran Vardanyan for his development of the iCosmos cosmology calculator.

The IceCube telescope buried beneath the South Pole has failed to detect any high energy neutrinos accompanying exploding fireballs in space, undermining a leading theory of how cosmic rays are born (Nature 484:351,2012).

Physics has long been a male-dominated subject. To fulfil the department's scientific mission, it is vital that we use the full potential of the population and redress that imbalance. Since 2010, the department has been developing a portfolio of new and existing actions to improve the employment conditions and practice for all staff and students. Good practice benefits everyone, but disproportionately benefits women. These actions, and the critical assessment that led to them, are described in our application for an Athena Swan Silver Award.