Oxford Physicist Henry Snaith has been named one of Nature magazine's 10 people who mattered this year for his pioneering work on a new type of solar cell based on perovskite semiconductors which promise high energy conversion efficiency together with low fabrication costs.
See http://www.nature.com/news/1.14367 for more details.
Professor Daniela Bortoletto* (Particle Physics) has been elected as a Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The Council and peers have elected members 'who have made scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications and who have been continuous members for the four years preceding their nomination'.
We congratulate Daniela and wish her continued success in her career.
Physics Today has highlighted research using the PImMS camera, a fast CMOS-based imaging camera developed by the PImMS collaboration between Oxford Physics, Oxford Chemistry and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
Tim Woollings has been awarded the inaugural University of Oslo Inspiration Award for Numerical Climate Studies, one of five such awards intended to "recognise and reward a valuable scientific output or a distinguished scientific career that others have found absolutely inspirational". Tim's award is for his paper "Variability of the North Atlantic eddy-driven jet stream" published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.
IceCube provides first evidence for high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin
The University of Oxford Physics Department held an industry day in October to highlight existing commercial projects and to gain interest in further industrial collaboration. Companies visited the department to find out more about working with Oxford Physics, including how to access their £3k collaboration voucher competition. The Head of the Department, John Wheater said “It is good to see so much interest from companies in the research going on in the department.
The Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, yesterday announced that the University of Oxford was one of 15 Universities to be awarded part of £100m of new NERC investment in Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTPs).
The Department of Physics is one of the core departments of the Oxford DTP in Environmental Research, offering a novel training environment across three broad science streams, including a Physical Climate Science stream of high relevance for Physics undergraduates considering graduate research in Climate Physics.
An international team, including Oxford Physicists Professor Justin Wark and Dr Andrew Higginbotham, has used the powerful X-ray laser at the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to create atomic-scale movies of 'the ultimate spring'. They subjected a micron thick layer of copper to nearly a million atmospheres of pressure within a few tens of trillionths of a second, and used x-rays with a shutter speed of a tenth of a trillionth of a second to record the atomic motion under these extreme conditions.
Peter Higgs and Francois Englert have been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for devising a mechanism to generate mass in gauge theories, and for predicting the existence of a new scalar boson resulting from this mechanism.
Nearly 50 years after the seminal papers written separately by Peter Higgs and by Francois Englert and Robert Brout, a boson with properties consistent with their predictions was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.
Prof Balbus was presented with the prestigious 2013 Shaw Prize for Astronomy at a ceremony in Hong Kong last month. See photos & videos of the ceremony at http://www.shawprize.org/en/
A TV documentary leading up to the awards can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wv4grOMgIU
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