Dr Wei Peng, lead author with colleagues Professor Ana Sanchez, Professor David Walker and Steven Hindmarsh have worked collaboratively with other institutions to publish their paper titled Flexoelectric polarizing and control of a ferromagnetic metalLink opens in a new window in Nature Physics on Jan. 17, 2024.

Professor Ray Dupree, Dr Rosalie Cresswell and Dr Dinu Iuga are co-authors of a recently published paper in Nature Plants titled ‘Ectopic callose deposition into woody biomass modulates the nano-architecture of macrofibrils’.

Professor Paul Goddard has been announced as the winner of the 2023 Brian Pippard Prize from the Institute of Physics (IOP) Superconductivity Group.

The Pippard Prize is named in honour of Professor Sir Brian Pippard, and is awarded on an annual basis by the IOP Superconductivity Group to a scientist working in the UK who has made a significant contribution to the field of superconductivity in the last few years.

The Global Network on Sustainability in Space, GNOSIS, founded by and based at Warwick, supports the global scientific community to apply their knowledge to achieving sustainability in space. In the four years since the launch of GNOSIS it has grown to be a diverse global network of over 650 members from academia, the space sector and government, who work together to address the impact of debris and space weather on the rapidly growing spacecraft population.

Space sustainability leaders from across the globe, including the Chair of GNOSIS Katherine Courtney, were gathered in London on 28^th June for a series of events hosted by the UK government and King Charles III.

Read more.

Congratulations to Dr Karolos Potamianos who has been awarded £287,845 from Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for a research project titled 'Expanding the timing frontier: precision timing for particle tracking and identification.'

The funding will permit the procurement of a 12 GHz signal generator, a fast oscilloscope (<8ps per sample), and a logic analyser. These will enable the proper characterisation of ultra-fast silicon detectors and associated readout at realistic operating conditions, in particular enabling precise measurements of their (ultra-fast) response signals.

The research will be led by Dr Karolos Potamianos. He said,

"The use of fast silicon in collider detectors offers many new opportunities, as high-precision timing information enables distinguish between collisions occurring very close in space but well-separated in time. This will greatly help mitigate the effect of overlapping proton-proton interactions (pileup) at the High-Luminosity LHC. It is thus essential that we can properly characterise these detectors, which the procured equipment will enable. However, challenges such as ensuring proper operation of the detectors in a tough radiation environment and that sufficient bandwidth is available to transfer data out of the detector remain to make these detectors a reality at the LHC.”

Congratulations to our final year PhD student, Thomas Killestein who is an author on a paper titled 'The Birth of a Relativistic Jet Following the Disruption of a Star by a Cosmological Black HoleLink opens in a new window' which has been published in Nature Astronomy.

Thomas tells us "The object itself is a black hole feeding on a star, and at peak was around 20 trillion times more luminous than that of our Sun, in an extreme example of astrophysics. the black hole is shredding a star similar to our own Sun, which forms a disc of material around the black hole, before ejecting material in jets at almost the speed of light, in one of the most energetic events ever seen."

The research has been undertaken by a global team, who conducted analysis of this newly discovered object across the electromagnetic spectrum. Thomas' focus was helping with ground-based infrared observations, remotely observing from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) New Technology Telescope (NTT) as part of the ePESSTO+ collaboration.

"While there are many theories as to what powers these energetic events, the vast energies of the jets seen in this system don't fit neatly into our understanding of the phenomena, so the puzzle continues. It's been amazing to be part of the research into this example of extreme astrophysics."