Congratulations to Hintze Research Fellow Rebecca Bowler who has been awarded the Royal Astronomical Society 2018 Winton Award for Astronomy.
News
An international team of astronomers, including many from the UK, has revealed an ‘astonishing’ overabundance of massive stars in a neighbouring galaxy.
The discovery, made in the gigantic star-forming region 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, has ‘far-reaching’ consequences for our understanding of how stars transformed the pristine Universe into the one we live in today.
Programmable photonic circuits that can implement linear transformation between any number of input and output optical channels are used both for quantum computation in quantum optics and for signal processing in telecommunications. These “universal multiport interferometers” can be built using meshes of reconfigurable beam splitters, for example on an integrated photonic platform.
Researchers at the University of Oxford have demonstrated, for the first time, how to use molecules to manipulate the surface of a ‘topological insulator’, an exotic material with unusual electronic properties. Understanding and manipulating these properties is a notable step towards the innovative information transfer and storage promised by ‘spintronics’.
Radioactivity detectors are widely used in society to ensure safe levels of human exposure to potentially dangerous radiation are maintained. Measuring radiation in the atmosphere is also of great interest to researchers as its effects on the lower atmosphere are currently poorly understood.
Oxford Physicists have partnered with UK quantum technology companies to win funding in the latest Innovate UK competition. Three of our collaborative projects were awarded grants and are described below.
A group of scientists which includes Prof Subir Sarkar Head of Particle Theory Group, Theoretical Physics, working with the world’s largest particle detector, have for the first time demonstrated the Earth’s ability to stop highly energetic neutrino particles.
Read the whole article here.
Simon Hooker is a Professor of Atomic and Laser Physics at Oxford and Chris Arran and Robert Shalloo are two of his graduate students. They discuss the group's work on developing plasma accelerators for real-world applications.
Professor Frederick K. Lamb
University of Illinois
Friday 1 December 2017 at 3.30pm
Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, followed by reception
Title: Scientific and Policy Aspects of the Iran Nuclear Deal
Signal couplers allow signals from two transmission lines to be combined and/or split, and can be used in a variety of applications including power distribution networks, sensor arrays, and astronomical instrumentation. Conventional couplers have both transmission lines, which carry the signal, running in parallel to each other, which makes them unsuitable for circuits that require signal path crossing or bypassing, particularly in applications in a linear array. Traditionally this is overcome by using cross-guide coupler, additional cabling or series of optical free-space beam splitters.