Although scientists knew one atom thick, two-dimensional crystal graphene existed, no-one had figured out how to extract it from graphite, until Professor Geim and Professor Novoselov’s groundbreaking work in Swagֱ�� in 2004.

Geim and Novoselov frequently held ‘Friday night experiments’, where they would play around with ideas and experiments that weren’t necessarily linked to their usual research. It was through these experiments that the two first isolated graphene, by using sticky tape to peel off thin flakes of graphite, ushering in a new era of material science.

Their seminal paper ‘, has since been cited over 40,000 times, making it one of the most highly referenced scientific papers of all time.

What Andre and Kostya had achieved was a profound breakthrough, which would not only earn the pair a Nobel Prize in 2010 but would revolutionise the scientific world.

The vast number of products, processes and industries for which graphene could significantly impact all stem from its extraordinary properties. No other material has the breadth of superlatives that graphene boasts:

• It is many times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible
• It is electrically and thermally conductive but also transparent
• It is the world’s first two-dimensional material and is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair.

It’s areas for application are endless: transport, medicine, electronics, energy, defence, desalination, are all being transformed by graphene research.

In biomedical technology, graphene’s unique properties allow for groundbreaking biomedical applications, such as targeted drug delivery and DIY health-testing kits. In sport, graphene-enhanced running shoes deliver more grip, durability and 25% greater energy return than standard running trainers – as well as the world’s first .

Speaking at the , hosted by Swagֱ��, Professor Sir Andre Geim said: “If you have an electric car, graphene is there. If you are talking about flexible, transparent and wearable electronics, graphene-like materials have a good chance of being there. Graphene is also in lithium ion batteries as it improves these batteries by 1 or 2 per cent.”

The excitement, interest and ambition surrounding the material has created a ‘graphene economy’, which is increasingly driven by the challenge to tackle climate change, and for global economies to achieve zero carbon.

At the heart of this economy is Swagֱ��, which has built a model research and innovation community, with graphene at its core. The enables academics and their industrial partners to work together on new applications of graphene and other 2D materials, while the accelerates lab-market development, supporting more than 50 spin-outs and numerous new technologies.

Professor James Baker,  CEO of Graphene@Swagֱ�� said: “As we enter the 20^th anniversary since the first discovery of graphene, we are now seeing a real ‘tipping point’ in the commercialisation of products and applications, with many products now in the market or close to entering. We are also witnessing a whole new eco-system of businesses starting to scale up their products and applications, many of which are based in Swagֱ��."

What about the next 20 years?

The next 20 years promise even greater discoveries and Swagֱ�� remains at the forefront of exploring the limitless graphene yields.

Currently, researchers working with INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, with funding from the European Commission’s Graphene Flagship, are developing brain implants from graphene which could enable precision surgery for diseases such as cancer.

Researchers have also developed wearable sensors, based on a 2D material called hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), which have the potential to change the way respiratory health is monitored.

As for sustainability, Dr Qian Yang is using nanocapillaries made from graphene that could lead to the development of a brand-new form of , while others are looking into Graphene’s potential in grid applications and storing wind or solar power. Graphene is also being used to reinforce , to reduce cement use – one of the leading causes of global carbon dioxide.

Newly-appointed Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair, Professor Rahul Nair, is investigating graphene-based membranes that can be used as water filters and could transform access to clean drinking water.

Speaking at the World Academic Summit, Professor Sir Andre Geim said: “Thousands of people are trying to understand how it works. I would not be surprised if graphene gets another Nobel prize or two given there are so many people who believe in this area of research.”

Discover more

To hear Andre’s story, including how he and Kostya discovered the wonder material in a Friday night lab session, visit: 

To find out more about Swagֱ��’s work on graphene, visit: 

To discover our world-leading research centre, or commercial accelerator, visit

To find out how we’re training the next generation of 2D material scientists and engineers, visit:

• .

Lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from smartphones and laptops to electric vehicles, store energy through a process known as ion intercalation. This involves lithium ions slipping between layers of graphite - a material traditionally used in battery anodes, when a battery is charged. The more lithium ions that can be inserted and later extracted, the more energy the battery can store and release. While this process is well-known, the microscopic details have remained unclear. The Swagֱ�� team’s discovery sheds new light on these details by focusing on bilayer graphene, the smallest possible battery anode material, consisting of just two atomic layers of carbon.

In their experiments, the researchers replaced the typical graphite anode with bilayer graphene and observed the behaviour of lithium ions during the intercalation process. Surprisingly, they found that lithium ions do not intercalate between the two layers all at once or in a random fashion. Instead, the process unfolds in four distinct stages, with lithium ions arranging themselves in an orderly manner at each stage. Each stage involves the formation of increasingly dense hexagonal lattices of lithium ions.

, who led the research team, commented, "the discovery of 'in-plane staging' was completely unexpected. It revealed a much greater level of cooperation between the lattice of lithium ions and the crystal lattice of graphene than previously thought. This understanding of the intercalation process at the atomic level opens up new avenues for optimising lithium-ion batteries and possibly exploring new materials for enhanced energy storage."

The study also revealed that bilayer graphene, while offering new insights, has a lower lithium storage capacity compared to traditional graphite. This is due to a less effective screening of interactions between positively charged lithium ions, leading to stronger repulsion and causing the ions to remain further apart. While this suggests that bilayer graphene may not offer higher storage capacity than bulk graphite, the discovery of its unique intercalation process is a key step forward. It also hints at the potential use of atomically thin metals to enhance the screening effect and possibly improve storage capacity in the future.

This pioneering research not only deepens our understanding of lithium-ion intercalation but also lays the groundwork for the development of more efficient and sustainable energy storage solutions. As the demand for better batteries continues to grow, the findings in this research could play a key role in shaping the next generation of energy storage technologies.

The (NGI) is a world-leading graphene and 2D material centre, focussed on fundamental research. Based at Swagֱ��, where graphene was first isolated in 2004 by Professors Sir Andre Geim and Sir Kostya Novoselov, it is home to leaders in their field – a community of research specialists delivering transformative discovery. This expertise is matched by £13m leading-edge facilities, such as the largest class 5 and 6 cleanrooms in global academia, which gives the NGI the capabilities to advance underpinning industrial applications in key areas including: composites, functional membranes, energy, membranes for green hydrogen, ultra-high vacuum 2D materials, nanomedicine, 2D based printed electronics, and characterisation.

On 21 June, an audience of literature enthusiasts, lovers of astronomy and archaeology and academics gathered on the stunning UNESCO Heritage site of Jodrell Bank to celebrate the Summer Solstice and one of the UK's most influential contemporary novelists, Alan Garner. This day-long event, consisting of panels, screenings, and guided walks, paid tribute to Garner’s literary work and his profound connection to Alderley Edge. 

The day commenced with a panel discussion on "Archaeotecture," chaired by Professor Teresa Anderson, with Professor Clive Ruggles and Professor Bob Cwyinski, to explore the intersection of ancient cosmologies and modern scientific discoveries. The panel discussed how Garner's fiction has bridged dialogues between disciplines such as archaeology and physics, offering imaginative continuities that enrich our understanding of the universe. The discussions were a testament to Garner’s ability to weave complex, interdisciplinary ideas into his narratives, making his work a subject of academic interest and admiration. 

One of the highlights of the day was "A Walk in Time" with archaeologist Melanie Giles. Participants were taken on a journey through the Jodrell Bank site, where Giles reflected on the objects and ideas that have inspired Garner’s writing. The walk included hands-on experiences with archaeological artefacts and replicas, bringing to life themes of landscape lore, craft skills, and protective charms that are prevalent in Garner's novels. 

Following the walk attendees were invited to a film screening of To The Round Meadow: Alan Garner & Jodrell Bank by Al Kenny. The film featured an intimate conversation between Alan Garner and his daughter, Elizabeth Garner, discussing his connection to the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank. This conversation delved into Garner's personal memories and reflections on the site, highlighting how it has influenced his writing and enriched his imaginative landscapes. 

The day continued with the panel discussion "Archaeology & the Imagination of Place," chaired by Melanie Giles. The panel, Tim Campbell-Green, Richard Morris, and Rose Ferraby, explored how Garner’s work, deeply rooted in the past, has woven archaeological knowledge, discoveries, and folklore into his narratives. Melanie Giles and Rose Ferraby discussed how their professional practices have been influenced and enriched by Garner’s storytelling and explorations of histories in the Cheshire landscape. 

The final panel, "A Place Across Time," chaired by Professor John Mcauliffe, featured Elizabeth Garner and medieval scholar David Matthews. This discussion centred on the intersections of historical and mythological time within imaginative fictions, poetry, and actual landscapes, drawing on Alan Garner’s vivid depictions of place across time in his works. 

In the evening our Solstice celebrations culminated with a reading and discussion of Sarah Perry’s latest novel, Enlightenment. Set in a small town in Essex, the novel intricately weaves a narrative of entangled relationships and emotional turmoil, exploring the conflict between faith and fact. Perry, renowned for her award-winning works such as The Essex Serpent, explored the novel's themes with Chair Teresa Anderson, and wowed guests with her seamless integration of astronomical principles into the storytelling. 

Electrochemical processes are essential in renewable energy technologies like batteries, fuel cells, and electrolysers. However, their efficiency is often hindered by slow reactions and unwanted side effects. Traditional approaches have focused on new materials, yet significant challenges remain.

The Swagֱ�� team, led by , has taken a novel approach. They have successfully decoupled the inseparable link between charge and electric field within graphene electrodes, enabling unprecedented control over electrochemical processes in this material. The breakthrough challenges previous assumptions and opens new avenues for energy technologies.

Dr Marcelo Lozada-Hidalgo sees this discovery as transformative, “We’ve managed to open up a previously inaccessible parameter space. A way to visualise this is to imagine a field in the countryside with hills and valleys. Classically, for a given system and a given catalyst, an electrochemical process would run through a set path through this field. If the path goes through a high hill or a deep valley – bad luck. Our work shows that, at least for the processes we investigated here, we have access to the whole field. If there is a hill or valley we do not want to go to, we can avoid it.”

The study focuses on proton-related processes fundamental for hydrogen catalysts and electronic devices. Specifically, the team examined two proton processes in graphene:

Proton Transmission: This process is important for developing new hydrogen catalysts and fuel cell membranes.

Proton Adsorption (Hydrogenation): Important for electronic devices like transistors, this process switches graphene’s conductivity on and off.

Traditionally, these processes were coupled in graphene devices, making it challenging to control one without impacting the other. The researchers managed to decouple these processes, finding that electric field effects could significantly accelerate proton transmission while independently driving hydrogenation. This selective acceleration was unexpected and presents a new method to drive electrochemical processes.

Highlighting the broader implication in energy applications, Dr Jincheng Tong, first author of the paper, said “We demonstrate that electric field effects can disentangle and accelerate electrochemical processes in 2D crystals. This could be combined with state-of-the-art catalysts to efficiently drive complex processes like CO2 reduction, which remain enormous societal challenges.”

Dr Yangming Fu, co-first author, pointed to potential applications in computing: “Control of these process gives our graphene devices dual functionality as both memory and logic gate. This paves the way for new computing networks that operate with protons.  This could enable compact, low-energy analogue computing devices.”

Since publication, a review of the paper was included in Nature’s News & Views section, which summarises high-impact research and provides a forum where scientific news is shared with a wide audience spanning a range of disciplines: .

The National Graphene Institute (NGI) is a world-leading graphene and 2D material centre, focussed on fundamental research. Based at Swagֱ��, where graphene was first isolated in 2004 by Professors Sir Andre Geim and Sir Kostya Novoselov, it is home to leaders in their field – a community of research specialists delivering transformative discovery. This expertise is matched by £13m leading-edge facilities, such as the largest class 5 and 6 cleanrooms in global academia, which gives the NGI the capabilities to advance underpinning industrial applications in key areas including: composites, functional membranes, energy, membranes for green hydrogen, ultra-high vacuum 2D materials, nanomedicine, 2D based printed electronics, and characterisation.

In an event at the Pankhurst Building, academics representing all faculties and the University’s Industry partners attended to learn about the establishment of these two leading Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning research Centres and hear more about the vision for continued growth. 

The Centres aim to solve real-world challenges through collaborative work utilising AI with other disciplines. Central to this is a focus on the fundamental methods being used to power the AI solutions. Advantages will come from leading-edge research breakthroughs in new methodologies for machine learning, with huge potential for cross-disciplinary benefits. 

The event provided an opportunity to recognise the early success of the Centre in successfully securing funding in three UKRI calls:

• Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowship 
• Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Decision Making for Complex Systems 
• AI Hub in Generative Models

This research income is fuelling lots of research at the Centre with AI-focussed work underway that bridges into other fields including robotics, healthcare and sustainability. 

Across AI Fundamentals and the ELLIS unit, currently over 25 PhD studentships are underway. It is anticipated that over 30 PhD students will join in the coming years with diverse and interesting opportunities soon to be advertised across the Centre websites and wider University channels.

The Centre for AI Fundamentals is eager to work collaboratively on high-impact problems we can better solve together. Anyone wanting to become involved with the Centre is welcome to engage with us directly or to learn more.

About the Centre for AI Fundamentals (AI-FUN)
The Centre brings together leading AI expertise in collaboration with experts in a range of fields. Led by Professor Samuel Kaski, the goal is to create and develop cutting-edge machine learning techniques to help solve real-world problems. .

About the ELLIS Unit Swagֱ��
ELLIS - the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems - is a pan-European AI network of excellence which focuses on fundamental science, technical innovation and societal impact. Led by Professor Magnus Rattray, the Swagֱ�� unit is one of 41 across Europe.  

Fast forward to today, and history repeats itself, this time in quantum computing.

Building on the same pioneering method forged by Ernest Rutherford – "the founder of nuclear physics" – scientists at the University, in collaboration with the University of Melbourne in Australia, have produced an enhanced, ultra-pure form of silicon that allows construction of high-performance qubit devices – a fundamental component required to pave the way towards scalable quantum computers.

The finding, published in the journal Communications Materials - Nature, could define and push forward the future of quantum computing.

Richard Curry, Professor of Advanced Electronic Materials at Swagֱ��, said: “What we’ve been able to do is effectively create a critical ‘brick’ needed to construct a silicon-based quantum computer. It’s a crucial step to making a technology that has the potential to be transformative for humankind - feasible; a technology that could give us the capability to process data at such as scale, that we will be able to find solutions to complex issues such as addressing the impact of climate change and tackling healthcare challenges.  

���� is fitting that this achievement aligns with the 200th anniversary of our University, where Swagֱ�� has been at the forefront of science innovation throughout this time, including Rutherford’s ‘splitting the atom’ discovery in 1917, then in 1948 with ‘The Baby’ - the first ever real-life demonstration of electronic stored-program computing, now with this step towards quantum computing.”

One of the biggest challenges in the development of quantum computers is that qubits – the building blocks of quantum computing - are highly sensitive and require a stable environment to maintain the information they hold. Even tiny changes in their environment, including temperature fluctuations can cause computer errors.

Another issue is their scale, both their physical size and processing power. Ten qubits have the same processing power as 1,024 bits in a normal computer and can potentially occupy much smaller volume. Scientists believe a fully performing quantum computer needs around one million qubits, which provides the capability unfeasible by any classical computer.

Silicon is the underpinning material in classical computing due to its semiconductor properties and the researchers believe it could be the answer to scalable quantum computers. Scientists have spent the last 60 years learning how to engineer silicon to make it perform to the best of its ability, but in quantum computing, it has its challenges.

Natural silicon is made up of three atoms of different mass (called isotopes) – silicon 28, 29 and 30. However the Si-29, making up around 5% of silicon, causes a ‘nuclear flip flopping’ effect causing the qubit to lose information.

In a breakthrough at Swagֱ��, scientists have come up with a way to engineer silicon to remove the silicon 29 and 30 atoms, making it the perfect material to make quantum computers at scale, and with high accuracy.

The result – the world’s purest silicon – provides a pathway to the creation of one million qubits, which may be fabricated to the size of pin head.

Ravi Acharya, a PhD researcher who performed experimental work in the project, explained: "The great advantage of silicon quantum computing is that the same techniques that are used to manufacture the electronic chips — currently within an everyday computer that consist of billions of transistors — can be used to create qubits for silicon-based quantum devices. The ability to create high quality Silicon qubits has in part been limited to date by the purity of the silicon starting material used. The breakthrough purity we show here solves this problem."

The new capability offers a roadmap towards scalable quantum devices with unparalleled performance and capabilities and holds promise of transforming technologies in ways hard to imagine.

Project co-supervisor, Professor David Jamieson, from the University of Melbourne, said: “Our technique opens the path to reliable quantum computers that promise step changes across society, including in artificial intelligence, secure data and communications, vaccine and drug design, and energy use, logistics and manufacturing.

“Now that we can produce extremely pure silicon-28, our next step will be to demonstrate that we can sustain quantum coherence for many qubits simultaneously. A reliable quantum computer with just 30 qubits would exceed the power of today's supercomputers for some applications,”

What is quantum computing and how does it work?

All computers operate using electrons. As well as having a negative charge, electrons have another property known as ‘spin’, which is often compared to a spinning top.

The combined spin of the electrons inside a computer’s memory can create a magnetic field. The direction of this magnetic field can be used to create a code where one direction is called ‘0’ and the other direction is called ‘1’. This then allows us to use a number system that only uses 0 and 1 to give instructions to the computer. Each 0 or 1 is called a bit.

In a quantum computer, rather than the combined effect of the spin of many millions of electrons, we can use the spin of single electrons, moving from working in the ‘classical’ world to the ‘quantum’ world; from using ‘bits’ to ‘qubits’.

While classical computers do one calculation after another, quantum computers can do all the calculations at the same time allowing them to process vast amounts of information and perform very complex calculations at an unrivalled speed.

Superconductivity, the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with zero resistance, holds profound potential for advancements of quantum technologies. However, achieving superconductivity in the quantum Hall regime, characterised by quantised electrical conductance, has proven to be a mighty challenge.

The research, published this week (24 April 2024) in , details extensive work of the Swagֱ�� team led by Professor Andre Geim, Dr Julien Barrier and Dr Na Xin to achieve superconductivity in the quantum Hall regime. Their initial efforts followed the conventional route where counterpropagating edge states were brought into close proximity of each other. However, this approach proved to be limited.

"Our initial experiments were primarily motivated by the strong persistent interest in proximity superconductivity induced along quantum Hall edge states," explains Dr Barrier, the paper's lead author. "This possibility has led to numerous theoretical predictions regarding the emergence of new particles known as non-abelian anyons."

The team then explored a new strategy inspired by their earlier work demonstrating that boundaries between domains in graphene could be highly conductive. By placing such domain walls between two superconductors, they achieved the desired ultimate proximity between counterpropagating edge states while minimising effects of disorder.

"We were encouraged to observe large supercurrents at relatively ‘balmy’ temperatures up to one Kelvin in every device we fabricated," Dr Barrier recalls.

Further investigation revealed that the proximity superconductivity originated not from the quantum Hall edge states propagating along domain walls, but rather from strictly 1D electronic states existing within the domain walls themselves. These 1D states, proven to exist by the theory group of Professor Vladimir Falko’s at the National Graphene Institute, exhibited a greater ability to hybridise with superconductivity as compared to quantum Hall edge states. The inherent one-dimensional nature of the interior states is believed to be responsible for the observed robust supercurrents at high magnetic fields.

This discovery of single-mode 1D superconductivity shows exciting avenues for further research. “In our devices, electrons propagate in two opposite directions within the same nanoscale space and without scattering", Dr Barrier elaborates. "Such 1D systems are exceptionally rare and hold promise for addressing a wide range of problems in fundamental physics."

The team has already demonstrated the ability to manipulate these electronic states using gate voltage and observe standing electron waves that modulated the superconducting properties.

���� is fascinating to think what this novel system can bring us in the future. The 1D superconductivity presents an alternative path towards realising topological quasiparticles combining the quantum Hall effect and superconductivity,” concludes Dr Xin. "This is just one example of the vast potential our findings holds."

20 years after the advent of the first 2D material graphene, this research by Swagֱ�� represents another step forward in the field of superconductivity. The development of this novel 1D superconductor is expected to open doors for advancements in quantum technologies and pave the way for further exploration of new physics, attracting interest from various scientific communities.

The is a world-leading graphene and 2D material centre, focussed on fundamental research. Based at Swagֱ��, by Professors Sir Andre Geim and Sir Kostya Novoselov, it is home to leaders in their field – a community of research specialists delivering transformative discovery. This expertise is matched by £13m leading-edge facilities, such as the largest class 5 and 6 in global academia, which gives the NGI the capabilities to advance underpinning industrial applications in key areas including: composites, functional membranes, energy, membranes for green hydrogen, ultra-high vacuum 2D materials, nanomedicine, 2D based printed electronics, and characterisation.

Described by the ERC as among the EU’s most prestigious and competitive grants, today’s funding has been awarded to:

• ,  Director of the Photon Science Institute, to develop a table-top nuclear facility to produce cold actinide molecules that will enable novel searches for new physics beyond the standard model of particle physics.
• Sir Professor Andre Geim, who isolated graphene in 2004 with Sir Professor Konstantin Novoselov, to explore 2D materials and their van der Waals assemblies.
•  , to explore Top and Higgs Couplings and extended Higgs Sectors with rare multi-Top multi-Higgs Events with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. This project aims at deeper insight into the most fundamental properties of nature beyond our current understanding.

Swagֱ�� received seven of the 42 grants awarded to UK institutions. The other Swagֱ�� recipients are:

 Thomas Anthopoulos, Professor of Emerging Optoelectronics, based in the and , to investigate scalable nanomanufacturing paradigms for emerging electronics (SNAP). The program aims to develop sustainable large-area electronics, a potential game-changer in emerging semiconductor markets, that will help reduce society's reliance on current polluting technologies while enabling radically new applications.

•  , to lead work into chemically fuelled molecular ratchets. Ratcheting underpins the mechanisms of molecular machinery, gives chemical processes direction, and helps explain how chemistry becomes biology.
• , in the Department of Chemistry and  Swagֱ�� Institute of Biotechnology, to develop enzymatic methods for peptide synthesis (EZYPEP). Peptides are fundamental in life and are widely used as therapeutic agents, vaccines, biomaterials and in many other applications. Currently peptides are produced by chemical synthesis, which is inefficient, expensive, difficult to scale-up and creates a huge amount of harmful waste that is damaging to the environment. EZYPEP will address this problem by developing enzymatic methods for the more sustainable, cleaner and scalable synthesis of peptides, including essential medicines to combat infectious diseases, cancer and diabetes.
• advanced gran,  to investigate how genomic complexity shapes long-term bacterial evolution and adaptation.

The grant recipients will join a community of just 255 awarded ERC advanced grants, from a total of 1,829 submissions. The community also includes:

As a result of today’s announcement, the ERC will be investing nearly €652 million across the 255 projects.

Professor Chris Parkes, Head of Department for Physics and Astronomy, which received three of the seven grants, said: “Today’s triple award reflects our department’s continued leadership in pioneering research. We’re home to Jodrell Bank, host of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory – set to be the largest radio telescope in the world; the National Graphene Institute – a world-leading centre for 2D material research with the largest clean rooms in European academia; we lead experiments at CERN and Fermilab; and – crucially – we host a world-leading community of vibrant and collaborative researchers like Professors Flanagan, Geim and Peters who lead the way. Today’s announcement recognises their role as outstanding research leaders who will drive the next generation to deliver transformative breakthroughs.”

Professor Richard Curry, Vice-Dean for Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Swagֱ��, added: “Our University’s history of scientific and engineering research is internationally recognised but it does not constrain us. Instead, it’s the work of our researchers – like the seven leaders celebrated today – and what they decide to do next, that will define us.  We are proud to have a culture where responsible risk-taking is nurtured and transformative outcomes delivered, and we look forward to these colleagues using this environment to deliver world-leading and world-changing research.”

Iliana Ivanova, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth at the ERC, said: “This investment nurtures the next generation of brilliant minds. I look forward to seeing the resulting breakthroughs and fresh advancements in the years ahead.”

The ERC grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.

Described by the ERC as among the EU’s most prestigious and competitive grants, today’s funding has been awarded to the following senior research leaders:

• , Professor of Emerging Optoelectronics, based in the and , to investigate scalable nanomanufacturing paradigms for emerging electronics (SNAP). The program aims to develop sustainable large-area electronics, a potential game-changer in emerging semiconductor markets, that will help reduce society's reliance on current polluting technologies while enabling radically new applications.
• , Chair in Evolutionary Biology, in the School of Biological Sciences, to investigate how genomic complexity shapes long-term bacterial evolution and adaptation.
• , in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Director of the Photon Science Institute to develop a table-top nuclear facility to produce cold actinide molecules that will enable novel searches for new physics beyond the standard model of particle physics.
• Professor Sir Andre Geim, who isolated graphene in 2004 with Professor Sir Konstantin Novoselov, to explore 2D materials and their van der Waals assemblies.
• , to lead work into chemically fuelled molecular ratchets. Ratcheting underpins the mechanisms of molecular machinery, gives chemical processes direction, and helps explain how chemistry becomes biology.
• , in the Department of Chemistry and  Swagֱ�� Institute of Biotechnology, to develop enzymatic methods for peptide synthesis (EZYPEP). Peptides are fundamental in life and are widely used as therapeutic agents, vaccines, biomaterials and in many other applications. Currently peptides are produced by chemical synthesis, which is inefficient, expensive, difficult to scale-up and creates a huge amount of harmful waste that is damaging to the environment. EZYPEP will address this problem by developing enzymatic methods for the more sustainable, cleaner and scalable synthesis of peptides, including essential medicines to combat infectious diseases, cancer and diabetes.
•  , based in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, to explore Top and Higgs Couplings and extended Higgs Sectors with rare multi-Top multi-Higgs Events with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. This project aims at deeper insight into the most fundamental properties of nature beyond our current understanding.

Swagֱ�� received seven of the 42 grants awarded to UK institutions.

The grant recipients will join a community of just 255 awarded ERC advanced grants, from a total of 1,829 submissions.

As a result of today’s announcement, the ERC will be investing nearly €652 million across the 255 projects.

Head of Department for Physics and Astronomy, which received three of the seven grants, said: “Today’s triple award reflects our department’s continued leadership in pioneering research. We’re home to Jodrell Bank, host of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory – set to be the largest radio telescope in the world; the National Graphene Institute – a world-leading centre for 2D material research with the largest clean rooms in European academia; we lead experiments at CERN and Fermilab; and – crucially – we host a world-leading community of vibrant and collaborative researchers like Professors Flanagan, Geim and Peters who lead the way. Today’s announcement recognises their role as outstanding research leaders who will drive the next generation to deliver transformative breakthroughs.”

, Vice-Dean for Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Swagֱ��, added: “Our University’s history of scientific and engineering research is internationally recognised but it does not constrain us. Instead, it’s the work of our researchers – like the seven leaders celebrated today – and what they decide to do next, that will define us.  We are proud to have a culture where responsible risk-taking is nurtured and transformative outcomes delivered, and we look forward to these colleagues using this environment to deliver world-leading and world-changing research.”

, Vice-Dean for Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, said: "These awards are welcome recognition of the world-leading and transformative frontier science that Swagֱ�� researchers are delivering. The compelling and innovative research supported by these ERC awards builds on the excellent local environment at Swagֱ�� and are cornerstones of the University’s strategy for excellence and leadership in research and innovation. The positive and real-world global impact from these research awards could deliver are genuinely tangible.

"As we enter our third century, the awards made in a highly competitive environment, are evidence that we do so with a continued pioneering approach to discovery and the pursuit of knowledge that our research community was built on."

Iliana Ivanova, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth at the ERC, said: “This investment nurtures the next generation of brilliant minds. I look forward to seeing the resulting breakthroughs and fresh advancements in the years ahead.”

The ERC grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.

• Tiny channels of nanometer scale (1 nanometer = 1/billionth of a meter) are found in nature that allow substances to pass through and filter out impurities. These are present in human cell linings and in the neurons in brain. Scientists have only recently begun to understand the importance of these channels. Creating these structures artificially could be useful for many things, such as testing medicines, delivering drugs, and filtering water.
• Nanofluidics is the study of the transport of fluids that are confined to structures of nanometer length scale. Swagֱ��’s  investigates nanocapillaries’ design and fabrication. The first paper that described the fabrication of the angstrom scale 2D channels was co-led by Prof Sir Andre Geim and Prof Radha Boya.
• The brain uses ions, chemicals and water to make its calculations and store 'memory' whereas artificial computers use electrons in their operation.  The emerging field of nanofluidic computing, also called ionic computing, raises the possibility of devices that operate similarly to the human brain.
   

The link between nanofluidics and computing

Imagine a computer that runs like our brains, consuming minimal energy and seamlessly processing information. That's the promise of nanofluidic computing, a radical departure from conventional computing architectures. Instead of relying on rigid binary systems, nanofluidics harness the flow of ions in fluids, mimicking the brain's efficiency and adaptability. This innovative approach could lead to computers that are not only more energy-efficient but also capable of handling complex tasks with ease.

Swagֱ�� researcher, Professor Radha Boya, is trying to mimic the behaviour of neuronal learning mechanisms using ions in water. Her research investigates utilising Ångstrom-scale (that is, one ten-billionth, or 0.1 nanometre) designer capillaries for molecular transport, ion sieving and sensing, energy harvesting and neuromorphic ion memory applications.

Building nanocapillaries

The team’s latest research involves the design and fabrication of capillary devices with atomically thin 2D materials assembled as 2D heterostructures. The capillaries are layer-by-layer structures of 2D materials such as graphene, with cavities running through the middle of the stack. To put it simply – this is the fabrication of atomic-scale channels with atomically smooth walls.

The 2D channel is created by the absence of 2D material, hence is a 2D-empty space. They can be fabricated on any relatively flat substrate and with the flexibility to choose any combination of 2D material walls ranging from hydrophilic to hydrophobic or insulating to conducting. Such customisation allows to exploration of anomalous or quantum properties of ultra-confined flows at ambient conditions and validates century-old theories.

This novel architecture of capillaries provides atomic scale tunability of dimensions and atomically smooth walls. Despite the Ångstrom (Å) scale, this is essentially a top-down lithographic technique which ensures its high reproducibility and flexibility.

The future of nanocapillaries and nanofluidic computing

Professor Boya’s team of physics and chemistry researchers investigates novel properties of materials in confinements, the aforementioned capillaries, at the limits of molecular sizes for unravelling their emergent physical and chemical properties. The group is exploring new perspectives in nanofluidics by pushing the boundaries of nanofabrication with angstrom-scale two-dimensional channels.

These devices are now a step closer to ‘nanofluidic computing’. Memory achieved using simple salt solutions in water is an exciting prospect hinting at the possibility of devices that operate similarly to the human brain.

Making  a difference: the impact of research

Membrane-based applications with nanoscale channels, such as osmotic power generation, desalination, and molecular separation would benefit from understanding the mechanisms of sieving, ways to decrease fluidic friction, and increasing the overall efficiency of the process.

However, mechanisms that allow fast flows are not fully understood yet. Professor Radha’s work on angstrom-capillaries that are only few atoms thick, opens an avenue to investigate fundamental sieving mechanisms behind important applications such as filtration, separation of ions, molecules and gases, desalination, and fuel gas separation from refinery off-gases.

About Professor Radha Boya

 is Royal Society University Research and Kathleen Ollerenshaw fellow at the University of Swagֱ�� (UoM), where she is exploring the fundamentals and applications of atomic scale nanocapillaries. She has been funded through a series of highly competitive and prestigious international fellowships, including Indo-US pre- and postdoctoral, as well as European Union's Marie Sklodowska-Curie and Leverhulme early career fellowships. Radha was named as UNESCO L’Oréal-women in science fellow, and was recognized as an inventor of MIT Technology Review's "Innovators under 35" list, RSC Marlow award, Philip Leverhulme Prize, and Analytical Chemistry Young Innovator Award and is an ERC starting grant awardee.

Recent relevant papers :

To discuss this research further contact Professor Radha Boya.

Discover how to access our world-leading research and state-of-the-art equipment. Visit our to find out about the National Graphene Institute and our other world-leading facilities. 
 

• Water is everywhere. It’s essential to all life forms, so is ubiquitous. 
• It also carries enormous energy. 70% of solar radiation that reaches the surface of earth gets absorbed by water. This energy circulates with water around the globe and transfers into other forms of energy. 
• But most of the energy – for example, osmotic energy, stored in water is not exploited yet. Imagine if we could harness energy stored in water? 
• In Swagֱ�� – a city known for its rain – research led by Dr Qian Yang explores the fundamental questions around the structure and behaviour of water at the molecular level. 
• Using nanocapillaries made from graphene she is progressing underpinning research that could lead to the development of a brand-new form of renewable energy that could revolutionise sustainable living. 

The potential of water as a source of energy is vast. Hydroelectric power plants, for example, have been explored in large scale to harvest the kinetic energy of water, yet this technology causes significant changes to the local ecosystem. Which means, we still can’t harness the enormous amount of energy stored in water. As a result, this endless energy resource is largely untapped. 

The water-solid interface is the key to harnessing energy toward more efficient water-energy nexus. This requires better understanding of the interfacial water structures and their interactive properties. So far, this progress has been hampered largely because lack of understanding of water at the nanoscale. As a general rule of thumb, structure determines properties and therefore the best applications. Therefore, our first priority is to figure out the structure of nanoscale water. But how do we do it? 

Nanocapillary confinement: analysing water molecules at atomic level 
The answer is using nanocapillary confinement, a tool first identified by Sir Professor Andre Geim in 2016, and now the focus of Dr Qian Yang’s research. 

Using a 2D material capillary, Dr Yang is able to confine a single layer of water molecules. This enables Dr Yang’s team to start to detect the structure of water, and determine its properties, advancing our understanding of key fundamental questions such as how water molecules arrange themselves and transport, and how it responds to light and behaves under electric fields. This will further enable single molecular detection which is essential for many chemical and biological applications. 

Understanding the unique interaction between water and graphene 
In parallel, she is also exploring the unique interactions between water and graphene at the water-graphene interface. Graphene carries charges; and the charges interact with the ions in water solutions at the interfacial area. This means if you pour water through graphene surface, and attach electrodes alongside, you can generate electricity. Through her research, Dr Yang is determining how to make this process work more efficiently, in order to design the materials that best harvest flow induced electricity – either from rain droplets or water flow in a river. 

Leveraging the Swagֱ��’s expertise, equipment and connections 
While researchers across the world are undertaking similar fundamental analysis, Dr Yang’s research has an advantage. The nanocapillary devices conceptualized by Professor Geim and housed in Swagֱ�� is extremely sophisticated, enabling atomic confinement that’s proving difficult for other institutions to replicate. Alongside, to accelerate discovery Dr Yang has access to: the National Graphene Institute, the biggest academic cleanroom facility in Europe; the expertise of Swagֱ��’s graphene community, the highest-density research and innovation community in the world; and a network of international collaborations. 

Leading discovery 
As a result of this capabilities, her team’s discoveries include capillary condensation under atomic scale confinement. For example, using a van der Waals assembly of two-dimensional crystals to create atomic-scale capillaries – less than four ångströms in height and can accommodate just a monolayer of water – Dr Yang has proven that the century-old Kelvin equation stands, rather than breaks down as expected. Dr Yang shows that this can be attributed to elastic deformation of capillary walls, which suppresses the giant oscillatory behaviour expected from the commensurability between the atomic-scale capillaries and water molecules. This finding provides a basis for an improved understanding of capillary effects at the smallest scale possible, which is important in many real world situations. For instance, for estimating the oil reserve worldwide. Her work also helps us to have better understanding of sandcastles, which are also hold tightly together by capillary force. 

Further to this, she has also explored ionic transport inside two-dimensional nanocapillaries to understand the mass transport and charge transfer process, for potential deionization and water purification applications. Overall, using combined nanocapillary devices with microfluidics system, together with precise electrical measurements, she examines: (i) capillary condensation inside nanocavities and modulated ionic transport; (ii) electricity generation induced by liquid flow through graphene surface; (iii) nanoconfined water structure and their properties. 

The future of energy harvesting 
Dr Yang’s work explores new physics and phenomena arise inside nanocapillaries, aiming at both better fundamental understanding of water at the atomic scale and working principles for designing more efficient energy harvesting devices at scale. 

By taking the research down to the atomic scale, she is progressing global understanding, and often confounding expectations – as in the case with the Kelvin equation. 

Her research will enable technologies in a wide range of fields, including single molecular sensing, medical diagnostics and energy harvesting. 
 

Dr Qian Yang 
is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Fellow at the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Her research explores the mass transport in 2D nanocapillaries enabled by van der Waals technology, molecular properties under spatial confinement, nanofluidics and electrokinetic phenomena at the water-graphene interface. She is also the recipient of the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in 2019, Royal Society University Research Fellowship and the European Research Council Starting Grant. 

Recent relevant papers 

To discuss this research further contact Dr Qian Yang.

Discover how to access our world-leading research and state-of-the-art equipment. Visit our to find out about the National Graphene Institute and our other world-leading facilities. 
 

It is thought that Isaac Newton's historic work on gravity was inspired by watching an apple fall to Earth from a tree. But for decades, scientists have wondered what would happen to an “anti-apple” made of - would it fall in the same way if it existed?

Until now, the question has left scientists with an incomplete picture of the Universe's gravitating content.

In a paper published today in , the collaboration at CERN’s Antimatter Factory, which includes academics from Swagֱ��, shows that within the precision of their experiment, atoms of antihydrogen – a form of antimatter – fall to Earth in the same way as regular matter.

Matter is anything that takes up space and has a mass and can be in the form of liquid, solid or gas. Things such as, air, water and rocks are all examples of matter. Antimatter is like the opposite of matter, made up of particles that have the opposite electrical charge. For example, matter has electrons, antimatter has positrons (antielectrons).

While matter is everywhere, its opposite is now incredibly hard to find, even though both were created in equal amounts in the infancy of our Universe.

The result pushes scientists one step closer to solving the mystery of antimatter.

Dr William Bertsche, Reader in the Accelerator Physics group at Swagֱ�� and a Deputy Spokesperson for the collaboration, said: “Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which he introduced over a century ago, describes how gravity works. Until now, we weren't entirely sure if this theory applied to antimatter. This experiment proves that it does, within the certainty levels of the results, and affirms one of the most celebrated scientific theories of all time.

“Understanding how gravity affects antimatter is crucial for both understanding mysteries surrounding both antimatter and gravity itself. The origin of the observed dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe remains an unsettled challenge to existing theories, which we aim to understand through careful observation of the behaviour of antimatter relative to matter. For its own part, gravity remains ununified with other theories, such as quantum mechanics, and therefore having a broader palette of observations will help further our understanding of it.”

ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst added: “In physics, you don't really know something until you observe it. This is the first direct experiment to actually observe a gravitational effect on the motion of antimatter. It’s a milestone in the study of antimatter, which still mystifies us due to its apparent absence in the Universe.”

Following a proof-of-principle experiment with the original ALPHA set-up in , the team trapped groups of about 100 antihydrogen atoms, one group at a time, and then slowly released the atoms over a period of 20 seconds.

Computer simulations of the ALPHA-g set-up indicate that this operation – for matter – would result in about 20% of the atoms exiting through the top of the trap and 80% through the bottom, a difference caused by the downward force of gravity. By averaging the results of seven release trials, the ALPHA team found that the fractions of anti-atoms exiting through the top and bottom are in agreement with the expectations from the simulations.

Jeffrey Hangst said: ����'s taken us 30 years to learn how to make this anti-atom, to hold on to it, and to control it well enough that we could actually drop it in a way that it would be sensitive to the force of gravity.

“The next step is to measure the acceleration as precisely as we can. We want to test whether matter and antimatter do indeed fall in the same way.  , which we first demonstrated in ALPHA-2 and will implement in ALPHA-g when we return to it in 2024, is expected to have a significant impact on the precision.”

An international team of researchers, including from Swagֱ��, working on the Muon g-2 experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have announced their much-anticipated updated measurement of the magnetic moment of the muon. Their findings are submitted today in the journal, Physical Review Letters.

This new measurement confirms the but with more than a factor of two improvement in precision. The measurement has an uncertainty of 0.2 parts per million and is the most precise ever made using a particle accelerator.

Muons are fundamental particles that are similar to electrons but about 200 times heavier. Like electrons, muons have internal magnets that, in the presence of a magnetic field, cause them to ‘wobble’ like the axis of a spinning top. The speed at which they ‘wobble’ in a given magnetic field depends on a property known as the magnetic moment of the muon, which is typically represented by the letter g. At the simplest level, theory predicts that g should equal 2. The difference of g from 2 — or g minus 2 — can be attributed to the muon’s interactions with particles in the quantum foam that surrounds it. As-yet-undiscovered particles can contribute to the value of g-2 opening a window to new subatomic phenomena.

“We’re determining the muon magnetic moment at a better precision than it has ever been seen before,” said Brendan Casey, a senior scientist at Fermilab who has worked on the Muon g-2 experiment for over a decade.

This precision was made possible in part by the contributions of a collaboration of UK research institutions being led by Mark Lancaster from Swagֱ��. Other institutions involved include the universities of Lancaster, Liverpool, and UCL as well as the Cockcroft Accelerator Institute.

Muon g-2 is an international collaboration between Fermilab and dozens of labs and universities in seven countries, including the UK. UK engineers and physicists have played an important role in the experiment for over a decade. The UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), supported construction of g-2 between 2014 and 2017 and in doing so enabled the UK to make significant contributions, exploiting unique expertise and establishing UK leadership within the programme.  Crucially, the UK provided one of the two main detector systems used to measure the motion of the beam of muons studied in the experiment.

“The precision of this measurement is an incredible achievement, made possible by the talent and ingenuity of many physicists and engineers, and particularly the young researchers.” said Professor Mark Lancaster of the University of Swagֱ��, UK lead for the g-2 experiment and an ex-co-spokesperson of the experiment.

The experiment also reused a storage ring originally built for the predecessor Muon g-2 experiment at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory that concluded in 2001. The main goal of the Fermilab experiment is to reduce the uncertainty of g-2 by a factor of four compared to the Brookhaven result.

“Our new measurement is very exciting because it takes us well beyond Brookhaven’s sensitivity,” said Graziano Venanzoni, professor at the University of Liverpool affiliated with the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, Pisa, and co-spokesperson of the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab.

With this latest measurement, the collaboration has already reached their goal of decreasing one particular type of uncertainty: uncertainty caused by experimental imperfections, known as systematic uncertainties.

While the total systematic uncertainty has already surpassed the design goal, the larger aspect of uncertainty known as statistical uncertainty is driven by the amount of data analysed. The experiment will reach its ultimate statistical uncertainty once scientists incorporate all six years of data in their analysis, which the collaboration aims to complete in the next couple of years. 

The Muon g-2 is made up of 181 collaborators, 33 institutions from seven countries.

Despite being made entirely of layers of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern, natural graphite is not as simple as one may think. The manner in which these atomic layers stack on top of one another can result in different types of graphite, characterised by different stacking order of consecutive atomic planes.   The majority of naturally appearing graphite has hexagonal stacking, making it one of the most “ordinary” materials on Earth. The structure of graphite crystal is a repetitive pattern. This pattern gets disrupted at the surface of the crystal and leads to what's called 'surface states', which are like waves that slowly fade away as you go deeper into the crystal. But how surface states can be tuned in graphite, was not well understood yet.

Van der Waals technology and twistronics (stacking two 2D crystals at a twist angle to tune the properties of the resulting structure to a great extent, because of moiré pattern formed at their interface) are the two leading fields in 2D materials research. Now, the team of NGI researchers, led by Prof. Artem Mishchenko, employs moiré pattern to tune the surface states of graphite, reminiscent of a kaleidoscope with everchanging pictures as one rotates the lens, revealing the extraordinary new physics behind graphite.

In particular, Prof. Mishchenko expanded twistronics technique to three-dimensional graphite and found that moiré potential does not just modify the surface states of graphite, but also affects the electronic spectrum of the entire bulk of graphite crystal. Much like the well-known story of The Princess and The Pea, the princess felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds. In the case of graphite, the moiré potential at an aligned interface could penetrate through more than 40 atomic graphitic layers.

This research, published in the latest issue of , studied the effects of moiré patterns in bulk hexagonal graphite generated by crystallographic alignment with hexagonal boron nitride. The most fascinating result is the observation of a 2.5-dimensional mixing of the surface and bulk states in graphite, which manifests itself in a new type of fractal quantum Hall effect – a 2.5D Hofstadter’s butterfly.

Prof. Artem Mishchenko at Swagֱ��, who has already discovered the said: “Graphite gave rise to the celebrated graphene, but people normally are not interested in this ‘old’ material. And now, even with our accumulated knowledge on graphite of different stacking and alignment orders in the past years, we still found graphite a very attractive system – so much yet to be explored”. Ciaran Mullan, one of the leading authors of the paper, added: “Our work opens up new possibilities for controlling electronic properties by twistronics not only in 2D but also in 3D materials”.

Prof. Vladimir Fal’ko, Director of the National Graphene Institute and theoretical physicist at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, added: “The unusual 2.5D quantum Hall effect in graphite arises as the interplay between two quantum physics textbook phenomena – Landau quantisation in strong magnetic fields and quantum confinement, leading to yet another new type of quantum effect”.

The same team is now carrying on with the graphite research to gain a better understanding of this surprisingly interesting material.

Image credit: Prof. Jun Yin (co-author of the paper) 

Advanced materials is one of Swagֱ��’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships tackling some of the planet's biggest questions. #ResearchBeacons

LHCb is one of the four large experiments at CERN’s 27km Large Hadron Collider, the world’s highest energy particle collider. Chris has been the deputy leader and then leader of the international collaboration for the past six years, during which time, the collaboration has grown to include over 1100 scientists from institutions in 21 different countries. 

In his time leading the team, the collaboration published 300 scientific papers, including the observation of new types of matter anti-matter asymmetry and the discovery of 34 new particles. The collaboration has constructed, installed and started operating its second generation detector, the LHCb Upgrade I, at a hardware cost of £60M. Critical elements of this new detector - modules of the silicon pixel vertex detector - were . 

Chris and the Swagֱ�� particle physics group also hosted the initial meeting in 2016 for the next-generation project that will succeed LHCb. This £150M next-generation detector for the 2030s - the LHCb Upgrade II - received its first stage approval last year under Chris’s leadership. 

The last three years has not been an easy period. The logistics for constructing a new detector at institutions across the world, and then installing it at CERN, were complex to begin with - and during the pandemic required many changes in plans. The collaboration also includes scientists from four institutes in Ukraine, which have had their lives greatly affected by the war, as buildings in Kharkiv and Kyiv have been damaged. The collaboration includes scientists from eleven institutions in Russia, many of whom were strongly opposed to the war. 

However, despite these challenges, the collaboration has continued to thrive, publishing world-leading science and starting operations of its new detector system. The final element of the new Upgrade I detector system was installed in March this year, and the latest results from the collaboration, released earlier this month, provide the world-best measurements of key parameters that quantify the difference in behaviour of matter and antimatter inside the fundamental theory of particle physics. 

����'s a privilege to have had the opportunity to lead the LHCb collaboration for the past years” said Chris, “and the collaboration has shown what can be achieved with people from across the world working openly together in pursuit of common goals”. 
 

Pictured above: Water-graphene quantum friction (Credits: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda / Simons Foundation) 

Advanced materials is one of Swagֱ��’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships tackling some of the planet's biggest questions. #ResearchBeacons

Complex systems play a vital role in our daily lives, whether that be predicting traffic patterns, weather forecasts, or understanding financial markets. However, accurately predicting these behaviours and making informed decisions relies on storing and tracking vast information from events in the distant past – a process which presents huge challenges.

Current models using artificial intelligence see their memory requirements increase by more than a hundredfold every two years and can often involve optimisation over billions – or even trillions – of parameters. Such immense amounts of information lead to a bottleneck where we must trade-off memory cost against predictive accuracy.

A collaborative team of researchers from Swagֱ��, the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) propose that quantum technologies could provide a way to mitigate this trade-off.

The team have successfully implemented quantum models that can simulate a family of complex processes with only a single qubit of memory – the basic unit of quantum information – offering substantially reduced memory requirements.

Unlike classical models that rely on increasing memory capacity as more data from past events are added, these quantum models will only ever need one qubit of memory.

The development, published in the journal , represents a significant advancement in the application of quantum technologies in complex system modelling.

Dr Thomas Elliott, project leader and Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Fellow at Swagֱ��, said: “Many proposals for quantum advantage focus on using quantum computers to calculate things faster. We take a complementary approach and instead look at how quantum computers can help us reduce the size of the memory we require for our calculations.

“One of the benefits of this approach is that by using as few qubits as possible for the memory, we get closer to what is practical with near-future quantum technologies. Moreover, we can use any extra qubits we free up to help mitigate against errors in our quantum simulators.”

The project builds on an earlier theoretical proposal by Dr Elliott and the Singapore team. To test the feasibility of the approach, they joined forces with USTC, who used a photon-based quantum simulator to implement the proposed quantum models.

The team achieved higher accuracy than is possible with any classical simulator equipped with the same amount of memory. The approach can be adapted to simulate other complex processes with different behaviours.

Dr Wu Kang-Da, post-doctoral researcher at USTC and joint first author of the research, said: “Quantum photonics represents one of the least error-prone architectures that has been proposed for quantum computing, particularly at smaller scales. Moreover, because we are configuring our quantum simulator to model a particular process, we are able to finely-tune our optical components and achieve smaller errors than typical of current universal quantum computers.”

Dr Chengran Yang, Research Fellow at CQT and also joint first author of the research, added: “This is the first realisation of a quantum stochastic simulator where the propagation of information through the memory over time is conclusively demonstrated, together with proof of greater accuracy than possible with any classical simulator of the same memory size.”

Beyond the immediate results, the scientists say that the research presents opportunities for further investigation, such as exploring the benefits of reduced heat dissipation in quantum modelling compared to classical models. Their work could also find potential applications in financial modelling, signal analysis and quantum-enhanced neural networks.

Next steps include plans to explore these connections, and to scale their work to higher-dimensional quantum memories.

Dr Sophie Nixon, a BBSRC David Phillips and Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Research Fellow in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, won the award for Sustainable Development, while Dr Kara Lynch, who was recently awarded an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship and Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Research Fellowship in the Department of Physics, won the award for Physical Sciences.

The national award works to support post-doctoral women scientists and overcome gender-driven inequalities. It offers a number of opportunities designed to help further establish women’s research careers. 

Dr Nixon and Dr Lynch are two of only five post-doctoral women scientists to win the 2023 award, which includes a grant of £15,000 each to spend on whatever they need to continue their research.

Dr Nixon's  research broadly looks how microbial communities in the environment cycle carbon, and how we can harness community-scale metabolism to help remedy global environmental issues, such as climate change and plastic pollution.

The project she will pursue with her award looks to microbial communities in hot springs for novel approaches to converting waste CO₂ emissions into value-added products in order to achieve a Net Zero future as soon as possible - an ambitious but potentially powerful nature-based solution to the CO₂ emissions crisis.

She said: ���� was a big milestone to even be shortlisted for this notoriously competitive award, but to win was just wonderful.

“Awards and programmes like this one are really important for putting a spotlight on women in STEM – we need more talent in STEM but also need to showcase and celebrate the talent we already have. One problem we have is lack a of role models, but another is peer support. This programme champions this talent and creates a really strong alumni network that will be invaluable going forward.

“For me, the most powerful part of this award is the flexibility the grant allows. A significant part of my grant will go towards the cost of childcare - I’ve been working condensed hours since the cost of childcare for our daughter has risen. The extra time and money this will buy me allows me to pursue some extra personal development training, some career and leadership coaching, and also attend events or conferences.

“I wouldn’t be able to achieve any of this if I couldn’t find a way to subsidise the cost of childcare. It has opened many doors and I’m extremely grateful.”

Dr Lynch's research revolves around nuclear physics and using laser spectroscopy and decay spectroscopy to understand the properties of exotic nuclei. Her upcoming research project will measure the shape of proton-emitting nuclei, which is a new and exciting opportunity to test and improve understanding of the nucleus.

She said: “The L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Rising Talent Programme is a really innovative and refreshing way of supporting women in science, as it allows you to use the grant in whichever way is most beneficial to your research and your career.

“Programmes highlighting and supporting women in science are very important, so we can encourage more women to pursue scientific careers as well as support those already in science. The postdoc years can be particularly challenging as we try to forge our own independent research career, so having a network of support is invaluable.

“I feel very lucky and proud to be alongside the wonderful and inspiring women who were shortlisted for this award, and to win was just a wonderful surprise.”

Dr Lynch will use the grant to buy research equipment that will allow her to perform the first laser spectroscopy studies of proton-emitting nuclei, which she hopes will kick-start her research programme in an unexplored area of nuclear physics. 

She will also use the grant for childcare to allow her to travel to CERN-ISOLDE – a radioactive ion beam facility - to perform her experiments outside of her normal working pattern.

Dr Lynch added: “Having just returned to physics research after a career break to start a family, the grant will uniquely support my desire to blend primary caregiving with my re-started academic career.

“I'm very grateful to L’Oréal and UNESCO for the opportunity to be part of this amazing network.”

All shortlisted candidates were invited to 10 Downing Street to discuss support for women in STEM. They met with George Freeman MP, Minister of State in the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, along with Angela McClean, Chief Scientific Advisor. They also received media training and had professional photographs taken at the Royal Society before attending the award at a ceremony at the House of Commons on Monday, 24 April 2023.

On 25 April, University colleagues and friends came together to celebrate the 100th birthday of Sir Francis Graham-Smith FRS, FRAS, FInstP. 

Sir Francis, or Graham as he is known to friends and colleagues, was the second Director of Jodrell Bank Observatory, taking over from Sir Bernard Lovell when he retired in 1981, and he has had a remarkable career in astronomy.

It began as a student working at the University of Cambridge alongside Martin Ryle. There he played a key role in pioneering the new science of radio astronomy, providing some of the most accurate positions for the newly discovered sources of cosmic radio waves. 

In 1964, he was appointed as a Professor of Radio Astronomy at Swagֱ�� and moved to Jodrell Bank. He worked on some early space-based radio astronomy experiments as well as ground-based detection of cosmic rays. 

However, when pulsars were discovered by Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish at Cambridge in 1967, his focus switched immediately to these new and important phenomena. Their study, using the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank and others, was to occupy much of the remainder of his career. 

Graham has continued to be an active member of Jodrell Bank’s pulsar research group, completing the latest edition of the research text ‘Pulsar Astronomy’ in his 99th year! 

The Astronomer Royal, Professor Martin Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, said, “We are greatly indebted to Graham's sustained leadership to promote UK astronomy. It's wonderful that he is still with us to appreciate the amazing progress in pulsar studies that he helped to initiate. All good wishes for the second century!”

Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Swagֱ�� passed on her best wishes: “Happy birthday Sir Francis and thank you for all you have done for Swagֱ�� and for astronomy globally’.&�Բ�����;

Professor Andrew Lyne, FRS, Director of Jodrell Bank Observatory from 1999 to 2006, and himself a renowned pulsar researcher, added, “Graham is a supreme physicist and astronomer and has been a wonderful leader in the Observatory, the University and the country". 

In 1970, Graham was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. He then became Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1975 before returning to Jodrell Bank to take over as Director in 1981. From 1975 to 1977, he was President of the Royal Astronomical Society and, from 1982 to 1990, he was Astronomer Royal. He received a knighthood in 1986. 

Outside his work in research and scientific management, Graham has always been a strong supporter of and participant in public engagement with science. For example, he delivered the 1965 Royal Institution Christmas Lecture alongside fellow radio astronomers Sir Bernard Lovell, Sir Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish and - amongst many other activities including writing popular books and research-level texts - he played a significant role in the development and management of the public visitor centre at Jodrell Bank. He is also a keen gardener and beekeeper. 

Selected recent books 

•  (Lyne, A. G., Graham-Smith, F., Stappers, B. (CUP, 2022)).  
•  (Burke, B. F., Graham-Smith, F., Wilkinson, P. N. (CUP, 2019)).  
•  (Graham-Smith, F. (OUP, 2016)).  
•  (Graham-Smith, F. (OUP, 2013)).

Selected research papers 

•  (Ryle, M., Smith, F. G., Nature (1949)). 
•  (Smith, F. G., Nature (1951)). 
•  (Jelley, J. V. et al (1965)). 
•  (Lyne, A. G., Smith, F. G., Graham, D. A., MNRAS (1971)). 
•  (Lyne, A. G., Pritchard, R. S., Smith, F. G., MNRAS (1988)).  
•  (Lyne, A. G., Shemar, S. L., Smith, F. Graham, MNRAS (2000)). 

Recent interviews 

• (Jodcast from 2016). 
• (Jodcast from 2015). 
   

"" by Yodatheoak is licensed under

As part of Comma’s Science-into-Fiction series, the project paired award-winning UK writers with leading physicists and engineers working at CERN, to explore different aspects of CERN's research, as well as its historical legacies, through fiction and accompanying essays (or afterwords) by the scientists.

The project began in the Summer of 2021 when particle physicists connected to CERN around the world were invited to be part of a new European-wide public engagement project. Over 150 topic submissions from scientists working on different aspects of science were received. Writers were then invited to respond to the list of ideas and were paired with the physicists whose ideas inspired them. We were overwhelmed with positive responses.

Professor Rob Appleby, Professor of Accelerator Physics at Swagֱ��, helped edit the book and said:  "This unique anthology brings together world class authors with the science of CERN. The resulting stories simply blow your mind."

March 2022 saw a delegation of selected writers visit CERN in many cases meeting the physicists they'd been paired with. The delegation included science-fiction author Ian Watson (whose credits include the screen story for Spielberg and Kubrick’s film A.I.), BBC National Short Story Award winner Lucy Caldwell, and novelist and screenwriter Courttia Newland (who recently worked with director Steve McQueen on the award-winning Small Axe series).

The final group of writers include those on the CERN visit as well as Dr Who and Sherlock showrunner Steven Moffat (who’d visited CERN separately and set a previous episode of Dr Who at CERN), Dame Margaret Drabble, Stephen Baxter (winner of the Philip K Dick and John W Campbell Memorial Award), Adam Marek and others. In the months that followed, writers and scientists continued to work together, exchanging ideas, with the latter acting as consultants to make sure the science is accurately represented.

The project is supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) as part of HL-LHC-UK phase 2 and has been devised as a form of outreach to reach and inform new audiences about CERN’s work.

A decade after the discovery of the Higgs boson, CERN still lead the world in the search to uncover the secrets of the universe, how it was formed, and what fate may lie in store for it. If there is such a thing as a ‘cutting edge’, it surely lies 100 metres below the Swiss-French border at the point where the beams of the Large Hadron Collider meet.

As part of a unique collaboration (this is a first for CERN) this book has paired a team of award-winning authors with CERN physicists to explore some of the discoveries made there and the technology developed, through fiction and essays. From the possibilities of interstellar travel using quantum tunnelling to first contact with antimatter aliens, to a team of scientists finding themselves being systematically erased from history, these stories (and their accompanying afterword's) explore the darkest of matters, under the brightest of lights.

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The process is called “VELO closing” in the LHCb jargon. The LHC has recently started its third running period after a three-year long shutdown. In this period, one of the four major experiments, LHCb, has been upgraded with new detectors and a new readout system to be able to operate with a five times greater collision rate and with improved data selection efficiency. The experiment, which is lead by Professor Chris Parkes of Swagֱ��, has reached a major milestone today.

The LHC accelerates two beams of protons to nearly the speed of light and brings these beams, which travel around the 27 km circumference ring in opposite directions, to collide at four points. These four collision points are surrounded by detectors that probe the interactions of fundamental particles, which are produced in the proton-proton collisions. The heart of the LHCb detector is called the Vertex Locator and most of its detector modules were .

The LHCb Vertex Locator modules can approach the LHC beams to as close as 5 mm, but they are retracted by about 3 cm to protect them during the period of beam injection and acceleration when the beams are less stable. Today, they have been brought to their fully closed position for the first time.

Professor Chris Parkes said: "The closing of the new LHCb Vertex Locator is a milestone for the upgraded experiment. Once closed, the LHC beams with an energy of the Eurostar train pass through an aperture the width of a pencil. The proximity of the sensors to the LHC beam will allow a precision imaging of the LHC collisions.”

The production of the Vertex Locator module was a major part of the £15m construction project in the UK, which was supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council and which was led by Professor Parkes. Starting with first discussions in 2007, the R&D for the upgraded LHCb experiment ramped up a decade ago and moved to the construction phase in the last few years.

The production of the Vertex Locator module was a major part of the £15m construction project in the UK, which was supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council and which was led by Professor Parkes. Starting with first discussions in 2007, the R&D for the upgraded LHCb experiment ramped up a decade ago and moved to the construction phase in the last few years.

Swagֱ�� produced about 80% of the Vertex Locator modules in the cleanrooms of the Particle Physics Group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. On the way to delivering these modules, the team of physicists, engineers, technicians and students overcame many challenges from adhesives not behaving as expected to the lab closure during the first COVID-19 lockdown.

Building every module started with taking delivery of the components and gluing the support legs to the half-millimetre thick silicon substrate, which acts as the main carrier plate for the remaining components and which provides cooling. This silicon plate contains microscopic channels etched into its inside through which liquid CO2 is pumped to absorb the heat produced by the sensors and readout electronics. The pre-fabricated silicon pixel sensors, which are connected to readout chips to form rectangular elements of 6 cm² size, were glued with micrometer precision onto the substrate alongside the front-end readout circuitry. Electrical connections were established with hundreds of tiny wire bonds and after all power supply and data readout cables were attached, the modules’ functionality is fully tested in a vacuum, resembling their final operational conditions at the LHC.

These modules required highly customised assembly tools and procedures and a bespoke test stand. The project was underpinned by the collaboration of engineers and physicists who devised the materials and processes to satisfy the operational requirement of the detectors, which are now operated in a high vacuum and which record the position of charged particles that traverse with a precision of about ten micrometres. The amount of particle collisions also require all components to be able to tolerate the radiation dose they will be exposed to over its lifetime.

Professor Marco Gersabeck, who leads the LHCb team at Swagֱ��, said:

“This first full operation is the finishing touch to a decade-long R&D a constructing project in which our team of physicists, engineers, technicians and students combined their skills and expertise to design and build most of the high-precision detector modules that make up the VELO detector.”

At CERN, other team members are involved on the frontline of VELO operations. They calibrate the position of the individual sensors on all VELO modules to micrometer precision and monitor the quality of the acquired data live. Over the coming years, they will determine how radiation affects the detector performance. The detector is designed to operate for the coming ten years, during which time the LHCb dataset is expected to increase by about a factor of six. The LHCb experiment, which is dedicated to the precision study of particles containing quarks, has over the past decade made landmark discoveries including new sources of matter-antimatter asymmetries and new particle states such as Pentaquarks. Over the lifetime of the new VELO modules, they will facilitate measurements with an unprecedented precision by recording 30 million collisions a second. 

Swagֱ�� team is now shifting focus to . This project, which is supported by a £49.4m , brings a new set of challenges and will deliver even greater precision to revolutionise LHCb’s discovery potential.

The prize is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding achievement in engineering research in the fields of medical, microwave and radar or laser/optoelectronic engineering, with the prize fund awarded to support further research led by the recipient. This year’s theme is lasers and optoelectronics.

Professor Kocabas’ research interests include optoelectronic applications of graphene and other 2D materials. He is nominated for his significant contributions to controlling light with graphene-based devices over a broad spectral range from visible light to microwave.

Outstanding research achievements

Sir John O’Reilly, Chair offor the prize, said: “The A F Harvey Engineering Research Prize recognises the outstanding research achievements of the recipient, from anywhere in the world, who is identified through a search and selection process conducted by a panel of international experts from around the globe.

“We are incredibly proud, through the generous legacy from the late Dr A F Harvey, to be able to recognise and support the furtherance of pioneering engineering research in these fields and thereby their subsequent impact in advancing the world around us," he added. "I’d like to congratulate our six finalists.”

The prize-winner will be chosen from and announced in December 2022. The winning researcher will deliver a keynote lecture on their research in spring 2023.

The IET’s A F Harvey prize is named after Dr A F Harvey, who bequeathed a generous sum of money to the IET for a trust fund to be set up in his name to further research in the specified fields. For more information, visit:

is one of Swagֱ��’s - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet. #ResearchBeacons

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is now equipped with new and enhanced data acquisition and computing structures which are now all operational.

Today (July 5) marks the start of the accelerator's third run of data-taking for physics at the facility on the French-Swiss border, near Geneva.

Staff and PhD students in the Particle Physics Group at Swagֱ�� play a central role in both the ATLAS and LHCb experiments (two of the four experiments collecting data from the LHC) from research and development of cutting-edge particle detectors for these experiments to multiple leadership roles in international research groups.

Professor Chris Parkes from Swagֱ�� currently serves a three year term as Spokesperson of the LHCb experiment and said: “We are excited to see the research, development and construction efforts from the past 15 years turn into measurements of unprecedented precision. These will enable us to test the Standard Model of particle physics in unprecedented ways but they will surely also lead to surprising and unexpected discoveries.”

Ten years since the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle was announced to the world, the LHC is today moving ahead to the next stage of fundamental physics experimentation to help humanity’s understanding of the fundamental particles and forces that govern the Universe. Using the upgraded machine, it is hoped that the LHC experiments will provide new insights into the dominance of matter over antimatter and the nature of dark matter.

The beam began circulating in April, after years of upgrades and maintenance work to make it even more powerful. The LHC machine and its injectors had previously been recommissioned to operate with new higher-intensity beams and increased energy.

Beam operators have now announced the beam is stable and ready to start taking data to be used for science. The LHC will now run around the clock for close to 4 years at the record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts (TeV).

As part of the international effort, UK teams have to improve the performance of each of the LHC’s four main instruments, as well as work on the beam itself.

Scientists from Swagֱ�� have long held leading roles in CERN through the ATLAS and LHCb projects. University of Swagֱ�� physicists continue to contribute to many ongoing CERN-related projects and over the weekend Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor, visited the site and met with some of the scientists involved.

The UK’s contributions to the upgrade are worth more than £25 million, funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

Professor Mark Thomson, STFC Executive Chair and particle physicist, said: “The hard work of many highly-skilled scientists and engineers in the UK has been vital to get to this point.

“Today’s news is just the beginning of an exciting few years, as physicists at CERN harness the power of the upgraded machine and vast detectors to push the frontiers of knowledge. Time will tell whether the LHC and its detectors, with their improved capabilities, can provide a first glimpse of physics beyond our current understanding.”

The four big LHC experiments have performed major upgrades to their data readout and selection systems, with new detector systems and computing infrastructure.

The changes will allow them to collect significantly larger data samples, with data of higher quality than in previous runs. The detector expects to record more than double the data during Run 3 than in the two previous physics runs combined. The experiment underwent a complete revamp, including Swagֱ��-built modules for the VELO detector at the heart of the experiment, and looks to increase its data-taking rate by a factor of 5.

Swagֱ�� is also leading on the UK’s contribution to the LHC’s luminosity upgrade (HL-LHC-UK), which will significantly increase the collision rate to discover new particles and make more precise measurements. While Phase 1 of HL-LHC-UK is just finishing, Phase 2 is due to complete in 2026 and involving nine UK institutions. The spokesperson for the project is Professor Rob Appleby from Swagֱ�� and the Cockcroft Institute, “The luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider is an exciting path to unlock a greater understanding of fundamental physics,” he said.

“The UK is proud to be contributing significant hardware through the project HL-LHC-UK. Both projects deliver hardware to the upgrade, including crab cavity cryostats, diagnostics and cold powering and simulations of performance.”

With the increased data samples and higher collision energy, Run 3 will further expand the already very diverse LHC physics programme.

Thanks to the UK’s subscription to CERN, managed through STFC, UK physicists will have the chance to use the LHC to try to address fundamental questions, such as the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe, the nature of dark matter, and will study the properties of matter under extreme temperature and density.

Scientists will also be searching for candidates for dark matter and for other new phenomena, either through direct searches or – indirectly – through precise measurements of properties of known particles.

Exotic particles, such as these, had only been theorised but not observed until recently. These exotic particles are built out of quarks.

“Like proton or neutrons, the particles that make up the nucleus of the atom, these new particles are made up of quarks”, explained Chris Parkes, Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Swagֱ��. “However, protons and neutrons are made of three quarks, whereas exotic particles are made of four or five quarks”.

Exotic particles were predicted as possible by theorists about six decades ago, but only relatively recently, in the past 20 years, have they been observed by LHCb and other experiments.

“Finding exotic particles and measuring their properties will help theorists develop a model of how these particles are built, the exact nature of which is largely unknown,” according to Professor Parkes. ���� will also help to better understand the theory for conventional particles such as the proton and neutron.”

The results presented today at a seminar, add three new exotic members to the growing list of new particles found by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles.

The LHCb collaboration is a collaboration of over 1000 scientists from twenty countries across the world. It has built and operates one of the four big detectors at the CERN LHC particle collider. The collaboration is led by Professor Parkes, while Swagֱ�� has more than twenty members of staff and PhD students working on the project.

The new findings show that the international LHCb collaboration has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”.

Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks”. Particles made of quarks are known as hadrons.

While some theoretical models describe exotic hadrons as single units of tightly bound quarks, other models envisage them as pairs of standard hadrons loosely bound in a molecule-like structure. Only time and more studies of exotic hadrons will tell if these particles are one, the other or both.

Most of the exotic hadrons discovered in the past two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark, with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down or strange quark or an antiquark. But in the past two years, LHCb has discovered different kinds of exotic hadrons.

Two years ago, the collaboration discovered a tetraquark made up of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, and two “open-charm” tetraquarks consisting of a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark and a strange antiquark. And last year it found the first-ever instance of a “double open-charm” tetraquark with two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Open charm means that the particle contains a charm quark without an equivalent antiquark.

The discoveries announced today by the LHCb collaboration include new kinds of exotic hadrons. The first kind, observed in an analysis of “decays” of negatively charged B mesons, is a pentaquark made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark. It is the first pentaquark found to contain a strange quark. The finding has a whopping statistical significance of 15 standard deviations, far beyond the 5 standard deviations that are required to claim the observation of a particle in particle physics.

The second kind is a doubly electrically charged tetraquark. It is an open-charm tetraquark composed of a charm quark, a strange antiquark, and an up quark and a down antiquark, and it was spotted together with its neutral counterpart in a joint analysis of decays of positively charged and neutral B mesons. The new tetraquarks, observed with a statistical significance of 6.5 (doubly charged particle) and 8 (neutral particle) standard deviations, represent the first time a pair of tetraquarks has been observed.

The LHCb experiment hopes to find further exotic particles in the future and start to understand the families in to which they form. The collaboration is starting collecting data with its new detector today for LHC Run 3. Critical elements of this new detector have been designed and assembled in Swagֱ�� over the past seven years.

The work could advance optoelectronic technologies to better generate, control and sense light and potentially communications, according to the researchers. They demonstrated a way to control THz waves, which exist at frequencies between those of microwaves and infrared waves. The findings could contribute to the development of beyond-5G wireless technology for high-speed communication networks.

Weak and strong interactions

Light and matter can couple, interacting at different levels: weakly, where they might be correlated but do not change each other’s constituents; or strongly, where their interactions can fundamentally change the system. The ability to control how the coupling shifts from weak to strong and back again has been a major challenge to advancing optoelectronic devices - a challenge researchers have now solved.

“We have demonstrated a new class of optoelectronic devices using concepts of topology - a branch of mathematics studying properties of geometric objects,” said co-corresponding author , Professor of 2D device materials at Swagֱ�� (pictured). “Using exceptional point singularities, we show that topological concepts can be used to engineer optoelectronic devices that enable new ways to manipulate terahertz light.”

Exceptional points are spectral singularities — points at which any two spectral values in an open system coalesce. They are, unsurprisingly, exceptionally sensitive and respond to even the smallest changes to the system, revealing curious yet desirable characteristics, according to co-corresponding author , Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State.

“At an exceptional point, the energy landscape of the system is considerably modified, resulting in reduced dimensionality and skewed topology,” said Özdemir, who is also affiliated with the at Penn State. “This, in turn, enhances the system’s response to perturbations, modifies the local density of states leading to the enhancement of spontaneous emission rates and leads to a plethora of phenomena. Control of exceptional points, and the physical processes that occur at them, could lead to applications for better sensors, imaging, lasers and much more.”

Platform composition

The platform the researchers developed consists of a graphene-based tunable THz resonator, with a gold-foil gate electrode forming a bottom reflective mirror. Above it, a graphene layer is book-ended with electrodes, forming a tunable top mirror. A non-volatile ionic liquid electrolyte layer sits between the mirrors, enabling control of the top mirror’s reflectivity by changing the applied voltage. In the middle of the device, between the mirrors, are molecules of alpha lactose, a sugar commonly found in milk.  

The system is controlled by two adjusters. One raises the lower mirror to change the length of the cavity - tuning the frequency of resonation to couple the light with the collective vibrational modes of the organic sugar molecules, which serve as a fixed number of oscillators for the system. The other adjuster changes the voltage applied to the top graphene mirror - altering the graphene’s reflective properties to transition the energy loss imbalances to adjust coupling strength. The delicate, fine tuning shifts weakly coupled terahertz light and organic molecules to become strongly coupled and vice versa.

“Exceptional points coincide with the crossover point between the weak and strong coupling regimes of terahertz light with collective molecular vibrations,” Özdemir said.

He noted that these singularity points are typically studied and observed in the coupling of analogous modes or systems, such as two optical modes, electronic modes or acoustic modes.

“This work is one of rare cases where exceptional points are demonstrated to emerge in the coupling of two modes with different physical origins,” Kocabas said. “Due to the topology of the exceptional points, we observed a significant modulation in the magnitude and phase of the terahertz light, which could find applications in next-generation THz communications.”

Unprecedented phase modulation in the THz spectrum

As the researchers apply voltage and adjust the resonance, they drive the system to an exceptional point and beyond. Before, at and beyond the exceptional point, the geometric properties - the topology - of the system change.

One such change is the phase modulation, which describes how a wave changes as it propagates and interacts in the THz field. Controlling the phase and amplitude of THz waves is a technological challenge, the researchers said, but their platform demonstrates unprecedented levels of phase modulation. The researchers moved the system through exceptional points, as well as along loops around exceptional points in different directions, and measured how it responded through the changes. Depending on the system’s topology at the point of measurement, phase modulation could range from zero to four magnitudes larger.

“We can electrically steer the device through an exceptional point, which enables electrical control on reflection topology,” said first author Dr M Said Ergoktas. “Only by controlling the topology of the system electronically could we achieve these huge modulations.” 

According to the researchers, the topological control of light-matter interactions around an exceptional point enabled by the graphene-based platform has potential applications ranging from topological optoelectronic and quantum devices to topological control of physical and chemical processes.

Contributors include: Kaiyuan Wang, Gokhan Bakan, Thomas B. Smith, Alessandro Principi and Kostya S. Novoselov, University of Swagֱ��; Sina Soleymani, graduate student in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics; Sinan Balci, Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey; Nurbek Kakenov, who conducted work for this paper while at Bilkent University, Turkey.

The European Research Council, Consolidator Grant (SmartGraphene), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Award on Programmable Systems with Non-Hermitian Quantum Dynamics and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Award supported this work.

This funding helps to keep the UK at the forefront of answering some of the biggest and most complex questions in science and supports the next generation of UK particle physicists.

As part of the latest particle physics experiment grants from STFC 18 UK universities will be able to carry out world-leading particle physics research over the next three years.

The particle physics group at Swagֱ�� will benefit from £4.6 million of new funding. The Swagֱ�� team exploits the data collected by two of the main experiments at the LHC, which collide protons at the highest energies currently accessible by accelerators. They also study the properties of the neutrino and search for dark matter using state-of-the-art liquid-argon detectors.

Andrew Pilkington, Professor of Particle Physics at Swagֱ�� said: “An important part of our research is to exploit the data collected by large international experiments, as this allows us to learn more about the fundamental particles that exist in nature.

“At the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, we search for new types of particles (or particle interactions) that are not predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics, including dark matter and anomalous Higgs boson interactions. At the LHCb experiment, we study the properties of the charm and bottom quarks, to better understand the matter-antimatter asymmetry observed in the Universe. At the SBND and Microboone experiments, we study the properties of the neutrino and search for new species of neutrino. At the Muon g-2 experiment, we study the possible anomalous interactions of the muon with external magnetic fields.

“We also play a major role in the design and construction of future particle physics experiments, from the upgrades of LHC experiments to the next generation of neutrino and dark matter experiments.”

Particle physics studies the world at the smallest possible distance scales and the highest achievable energies, seeking answers to fundamental questions about the structure of matter and the composition of the Universe.

Ten years after the UK researchers’ contribution to the Nobel Prize winning detection of the Higgs boson, some of the questions that the community is working to answer are:

·       What is the Universe made of and why?

·       What is the underlying nature of neutrinos?

·       Why is there an imbalance between matter and antimatter in the Universe?

·       How can we detect dark matter?

·       Are there any new particles or particle interactions we can find?

Professor Grahame Blair, STFC Executive Director for Programmes, said: "STFC continues to support the experimental particle physics community in the UK in answering fundamental questions about our Universe.

“The grants are vital in supporting technicians, engineers and academics in their skills and expertise in the field, all while encouraging career development in fundamental research with both universities and international collaborators. 

“This investment underpins the UK physics community and enables continued UK leadership in the field of experimental particle physics.”

Research teams funded by the UK are working on solving ground-breaking challenges in particle physics, including the race to detect dark matter, the investigation of neutrino oscillations and the search for proton decay – all key questions in fundamental physics which we still do not have answers to.

This characteristic, combined with TMDs’ outstanding optical properties, can be used to build multi-functional optoelectronic devices such as transistors and LEDs with built-in memory functions on nanometre length scale.

Ferroelectrics are materials with two or more electrically polarisable states that can be reversibly switched with the application of an external electric field. This material property is ideal for applications such as non-volatile memory, microwave devices, sensors and transistors. Until recently, out-of-plane switchable ferroelectricity at room temperature had been achieved only in films thicker than 3 nanometres.

2D heterostructures

Since the isolation of graphene in 2004, researchers across academia have studied a variety of new 2D materials with a wide range of exciting properties. These atomically thin 2D crystals can be stacked on top of one another to create so-called heterostructures - artificial materials with tailored functions.

More recently, a team of researchers from NGI, in collaboration with NPL, demonstrated that below a twist angle of 2^o, atomic lattices physically reconstruct to form regions (or domains) of perfectly stacked bilayers separated by boundaries of locally accumulated strain.  For two monolayers stacked parallel to each other, a tessellated pattern of mirror-reflected triangular domains is created. Most importantly, the two neighbouring domains have an asymmetric crystal symmetry, causing an asymmetry in their electronic properties.

Ferroelectric switching at room temperature

In the work, , the team demonstrated that the domain structure created with low-angle twisting hosts interfacial ferroelectricity in bilayer TMDs. Kelvin probe force microscopy revealed that neighbouring domains are oppositely polarised and electrical transport measurements demonstrated reliable ferroelectric switching at room temperature.

The team went on to develop a scanning electron microscope (SEM) technique with enhanced contrast, using signal from back-scattered electrons. This made it possible to apply an electric field in-situ while imaging changes to the domain structure in a non-invasive manner, providing essential information on how the domain switching mechanism works. The boundaries separating the oppositely polarised domains were found to expand and contract depending on the sign of the applied electric field and led to a significant redistribution of the polarised states.

This work clearly demonstrates that the twist degree of freedom can allow the creation of atomically thin optoelectronics with tailored and multi-functional properties.

Wide scope for tailored 2D materials

Lead author Astrid Weston (pictured right) said: ����’s very exciting that we can demonstrate that this simple tool of twisting can engineer new properties in 2D crystals. With the wide variety of 2D crystals to choose from, it provides us with almost unlimited scope to create perfectly tailored artificial materials.”

Co-author Dr Eli G Castanon added: “Being able to observe the pattern and behaviour of ferroelectric domains in structures that have nanometre thickness with KPFM and SEM was very exciting. The advancement of characterisation techniques together with the extensive possibilities for the formation of novel heterostructures of 2D materials paves the way to achieve new capabilities at the nanoscale for many industries.”

Advanced materials is one of Swagֱ��’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet. #ResearchBeacons

The team - comprising researchers from the National Graphene Institute (NGI) led by Dr Ivan Vera Marun, alongside collaborators from Japan and including students internationally funded by Ecuador and Mexico - used monolayer graphene encapsulated by another 2D material (hexagonal boron nitride) in a so-called van der Waals heterostructure with one-dimensional contacts (main picture, above). This architecture was observed to deliver an extremely high-quality graphene channel, reducing the interference or electronic ‘doping’ by traditional 2D tunnel contacts.

‘Spintronic’ devices, as they are known, may offer higher energy efficiency and lower dissipation compared to conventional electronics, which rely on charge currents. In principle, phones and tablets operating with spin-based transistors and memories could be greatly improved in speed and storage capacity, exceeding Moore’s Law. 

, the Swagֱ�� team measured electron mobility up to 130,000cm²/Vs at low temperatures (20K or -253^oC). For purposes of comparison, the only previously published efforts to fabricate a device with 1D contacts achieved mobility below 30,000cm²/Vs, and the 130k figure measured at the NGI is higher than recorded for any other previous graphene channel where spin transport was demonstrated.

The researchers also recorded spin diffusion lengths approaching 20μm. Where longer is better, most typical conducting materials (metals and semiconductors) have spin diffusion lengths <1μm. The value of spin diffusion length observed here is comparable to the best graphene spintronic devices demonstrated to date.

Lead author of the study Victor Guarochico said: “Our work is a contribution to the field of graphene spintronics. We have achieved the largest carrier mobility yet regarding spintronic devices based on graphene. Moreover, the spin information is conserved over distances comparable with the best reported in the literature. These aspects open up the possibility to explore logic architectures using lateral spintronic elements where long-distance spin transport is needed.”

Co-author Chris Anderson added: “This research work has provided exciting evidence for a significant and novel approach to controlling spin transport in graphene channels, thereby paving the way towards devices possessing comparable features to advanced contemporary charge-based devices. Building on this work, bilayer graphene devices boasting 1D contacts are now being characterised, where the presence of an electrostatically tuneable bandgap enables an additional dimension to spin transport control.”

Discover more about our capabilities in graphene and 2D material research at .

Advanced materials is one of Swagֱ��’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet. #ResearchBeacons

A vacuum is assumed to be completely empty space, without any matter or elementary particles. However, it was predicted by Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger 70 years ago that intense electric or magnetic fields can break down the vacuum and spontaneously create elementary particles. 

This requires truly cosmic-strength fields such as those around or created transitorily during high-energy collisions of charged nuclei. It has been a longstanding goal of particle physics to probe these theoretical predictions experimentally and some are currently planned for high-energy colliders around the world.

Now an international, Swagֱ��-led research team – headed by another Nobel laureate, Prof Andre Geim, in collaboration with colleagues from UK, Spain, US and Japan - has used graphene to mimic the Schwinger production of electron and positron pairs.

Exceptionally strong electric fields

In the , they report specially designed devices such as narrow constrictions and superlattices made from graphene, which allowed the researchers to achieve exceptionally strong electric fields in a simple table-top setup. Spontaneous production of electron and hole pairs was clearly observed (holes are a solid-state analogue of subatomic particles called positrons) and the process's details agreed well with theoretical predictions.

The scientists also observed another unusual high-energy process that so far has no analogies in particle physics and astrophysics. They filled their simulated vacuum with electrons and accelerated them to the maximum velocity allowed by graphene’s vacuum, which is 1/300 of the speed of light.  At this point, something seemingly impossible happened: electrons seemed to become superluminous, providing an electric current higher than allowed by general rules of quantum condensed matter physics. The origin of this effect was explained as spontaneous generation of additional charge carriers (holes). Theoretical description of this process provided by the research team is rather different from the Schwinger one for the empty space.

“People usually study electronic properties using tiny electric fields that allows easier analysis and theoretical description. We decided to push the strength of electric fields as much as possible using different experimental tricks not to burn our devices,” said the paper’s first author Dr Alexey Berduygin, a post-doctoral researcher in Swagֱ��'s Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Co-lead author from the same department Dr Na Xin added: “We just wondered what could happen at this extreme. To our surprise, it was the Schwinger effect rather than smoke coming out of our set-up.”

Another leading contributor, Dr Roshan Krishna Kumar from the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, said: “When we first saw the spectacular characteristics of our superlattice devices, we thought ‘wow … it could be some sort of new superconductivity’. Although the response closely resembles those routinely observed in superconductors, we soon found that the puzzling behaviour was not superconductivity but rather something in the domain of astrophysics and particle physics. It is curious to see such parallels between distant disciplines.”

The research is also important for the development of future electronic devices based on two-dimensional quantum materials and establishes limits on wiring made from graphene that was already known for its remarkable ability to sustain ultra-high electric currents.

Main illustration by Matteo Ceccanti and Simone Cassandra.

Advanced materials is one of Swagֱ��’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet. #ResearchBeacons

If a pore size in a membrane is comparable to the size of atoms and molecules, they can either pass through the membrane or be rejected, allowing separation of gases according to their molecular diameters. Industrial gas separation technologies widely use this principle, often relying on polymer membranes with different porosity. There is always a trade-off between the accuracy of separation and its efficiency: the finer you adjust the pore sizes, the less gas flow such sieves allow.

It has long been speculated that, using two-dimensional membranes similar in thickness to graphene, one can reach much better trade-offs than currently achievable because, unlike conventional membranes, atomically thin ones should allow easier gas flows for the same selectivity.

Now a research team led by Professor Sir Andre Geim at Swagֱ��, in collaboration with scientists from Belgium and China, have used low-energy electrons to punch individual atomic-scale holes in suspended graphene. The holes came in sizes down to about two angstroms, smaller than even the smallest atoms such as helium and hydrogen.

In December's issue of Nature Communications, that they achieved practically perfect selectivity (better than 99.9%) for such gases as helium or hydrogen with respect to nitrogen, methane or xenon. Also, air molecules (oxygen and nitrogen) pass through the pores easily relative to carbon dioxide, which is >95% captured.

The scientists point out that to make two-dimensional membranes practical, it is essential to find atomically thin materials with intrinsic pores, that is, pores within the crystal lattice itself.

“Precision sieves for gases are certainly possible and, in fact, they are conceptually not dissimilar to those used to sieve sand and granular materials. However, to make this technology industrially relevant, we need membranes with densely spaced pores, not individual holes created in our study to prove the concept for the first time. Only then are the high flows required for industrial gas separation achievable,” says Dr Pengzhan Sun, a lead author of the paper.

The research team now plans to search for such two-dimensional materials with large intrinsic pores to find those most promising for future gas separation technologies. Such materials do exist. For example, there are various graphynes, which are also atomically thin allotropes of carbon but not yet manufactured at scale. These look like graphene but have larger carbon rings, similar in size to the individual defects created and studied by the Swagֱ�� researchers. The right size may make graphynes perfectly suited for gas separation.

, compiled by global data analytics firm Clarivate and published on 16 November, features eight researchers based in the NGI, from a total of 15 from UoM who appear in the analysis.

The statistics cover the period from 2010-2020, ranking the top 1% by citations for field and year via online research tool , incorporating natural sciences, engineering, healthcare, business and social science.

The NGI researchers are listed below:

Three of the NGI staff (Geim, Gorbachev and Grigorieva) are among 10 physicists working in the UK who appeared in this year’s list. Only Cambridge (2) also had more than one academic in the UK physics ranking.

In the past decade, with the opening of the £61m  in 2015 and £60m  in 2018, Swagֱ�� has cemented its place as the home of research into graphene and other 2D materials, leading on both fundamental science and translational R&D into products and applications.

Professor Falko, Director of the NGI (pictured, right), said: “World-leading research is a combination of singular whirlpools, generated by outstanding individuals. The NGI is a home for many of those individuals, and we are constantly looking for a new talent, providing them with excellent infrastructure and offering a unique intellectual environment.”

The Clarivate report lists 6,600 researchers from more than 1,300 institutions and draws on statistics from around 12 million articles in 12,000+ journals.

Overall, the UK ranks third with 492 researchers on the global list (7.5%), behind the US (39.7%) and China (14.2%), but the report notes the UK punching above its weight, stating the result “is a particularly high number of researchers at the very top of their fields in terms of citation impact, given that the United Kingdom has a population 1/5 the size of the United States and 1/20 the size of mainland China.”

By institution, Harvard University leads the way with 214 researchers on the list, ahead of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (194). Oxford University is the leading UK institution at 10th on the global list with 51.

You can find out more about on the Clarivate website.

Advanced materials is one of Swagֱ��’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet. #ResearchBeacons

When a police car speeds past you with its siren blaring, you hear a distinct change in the frequency of the siren’s noise. This is the Doppler effect. When a jet aircraft’s speed exceeds the speed of sound (about 760 mph), the pressure it exerts upon the air produces a shock wave which can be heard as a loud supersonic boom or thunderclap. This is the Mach effect.

Scientists from universities in Loughborough, Nottingham, Swagֱ��, Lancaster and Kansas (US) have discovered that a quantum mechanical version of these phenomena occurs in an electronic transistor made from high-purity graphene. Their new publication: “Graphene’s non-equilibrium fermions reveal Doppler-shifted magnetophonon resonances accompanied by Mach supersonic and Landau velocity effects” was .

The research team used strong electric and magnetic fields to accelerate a stream of electrons in an atomically-thin graphene monolayer composed of a hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms. At a sufficiently high current density, equivalent to around 100 billion amps per square metre passing through the single atomic layer of carbon, the electron stream reaches a speed of 14 kilometers per second (around 30,000mph) and starts to shake the carbon atoms, thus emitting quantised bundles of sound energy called acoustic phonons. This phonon emission is detected as a resonant increase in the electrical resistance of the transistor; a supersonic boom is observed in graphene!

The researchers also observed a quantum mechanical analogue of the Doppler effect at lower currents when energetic electrons jump between quantised cyclotron orbits and emit acoustic phonons with a Doppler-like up-shift or down-shift of their frequencies, depending on the direction of the sound waves relative to that of the speeding electrons. By cooling their graphene transistor to liquid helium temperature, the team detected a third phenomenon in which the electrons interact with each other through their electrical charge and make “phononless” jumps between quantised energy levels at a critical speed, the so-called Landau velocity.

The devices were fabricated at the NGI in Swagֱ�� (see 'a' pictured above, where W=15μm). Dr Piranavan Kumaravadivel (right), who led device design and development, said: “The large size and high quality of our devices are key for observing these phenomena. Our devices are sufficiently large and pure that electrons interact almost exclusively with phonons and other electrons. We expect that these results will inspire similar studies of non-equilibrium phenomena in other 2D materials.

“Our measurements also demonstrate that high-quality graphene layers can carry very high continuous current densities, which approach those achievable in superconductors. High-purity graphene transistors could find future applications in nanoscale power electronic technologies.”

Dr Mark Greenway, from Loughborough University, one of the authors of the paper commented: “It is fantastic to observe of all these effects simultaneously in a graphene monolayer. It is due to graphene’s excellent electronic properties that we can investigate these out-of-equilibrium quantum processes in detail and understand how electrons in graphene, accelerated by a strong electric field, scatter and lose their energy. The Landau velocity is a quantum property of superconductors and superfluid helium. So it was particularly exciting to detect a similar effect in the dissipative resonant magnetoresistance of graphene.”

Advanced materials is one of Swagֱ��’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet. #ResearchBeacons

Main image (top): Non-equilibrium magnetoresistance oscillations at T = 40 K: magnetophonon resonance splitting and the Mach effect.

New results from the MicroBooNE experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory deal a blow to a theoretical particle known as the sterile neutrino. For more than two decades, this proposed fourth neutrino has remained a promising explanation for anomalies seen in earlier physics experiments. Finding a new particle would be a major discovery and a radical shift in our understanding of the universe.

However, released by the international MicroBooNE collaboration and presented during a seminar today all show the same thing: no sign of the . Instead, the results align with the , scientists’ best theory of how the universe works. The data is consistent with what the Standard Model predicts: three kinds of neutrinos—no more, no less.

“MicroBooNE has made a very comprehensive exploration through multiple types of interactions, and multiple analysis and reconstruction techniques,” said Bonnie Fleming, physics professor at Yale University and co-spokesperson for MicroBooNE. “They all tell us the same thing, and that gives us very high confidence in our results that we are not seeing a hint of a sterile neutrino.”

is a 170-ton neutrino detector roughly the size of a school bus that has operated since 2015. The international experiment has close to 200 collaborators from 36 institutions in five countries. They used cutting-edge technology to record spectacularly precise 3D images of neutrino events and examine particle interactions in detail—a much-needed probe into the subatomic world.

Swagֱ�� is one of the leading institutes on MicroBooNE. Professor Justin Evans, co-spokesperson of the experiment, has been leading this analysis for the past two years. The Swagֱ�� group, which also includes Professor Stefan Soldner-Rembold, has been heavily involved in the operation of the MicroBooNE detector and the analysis of the data. Of particular note, the Swagֱ�� group is leading a broad programme of searches for physics beyond the Standard Model with MicroBooNE, including searches for new heavy neutral leptons, and new particle sectors that couple to the Standard Model particles through the Higgs boson.

MicroBooNE is part of the Swagֱ�� group’s world leading liquid-argon neutrino-physics programme, in which we are also leading the construction of the new Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) that will sit in the same neutrino beam as MicroBooNE and a third detector called ICARUS, to form an exciting new facility called the Short-Baseline Neutrino programme at Fermilab. And looking further to the future, the Swagֱ�� group are playing a leading role in the construction of DUNE, the upcoming international flagship experiment that will enable us to understand the neutrino, and its role in the evolution of the universe, at an even deeper level.

Professor Justin Evans said: “What we have achieved here with MicroBooNE is a transformative step for the field of neutrino physics. The questions of short-baseline anomalies - unexpected appearance or disappearance of activity consistent with electron neutrinos - have been with us for two decades now, and those anomalies can be interpreted as the existence of new types of neutrino.

“Today, MicroBooNE has released results in which, with three independent analyses, we have studied, with exquisite precision, the interactions of neutrinos traveling over short baselines; and we have revealed a clear picture in which we see no excess of electron-neutrino-like interactions. This illustrates the power of the liquid-argon technology, and heralds the start of a new era of precision for neutrino physics, in which we will deepen our understanding of how the neutrino interacts, how it impacted the evolution of the universe, and what it can reveal to us about physics beyond our current Standard Model of how the universe behaves at the most fundamental level."

are one of the fundamental particles in nature. They’re neutral, incredibly tiny, and the most abundant particle with mass in our universe—though they rarely interact with other matter. They’re also particularly intriguing to physicists, with a number of unanswered questions surrounding them. These puzzles include why their masses are so vanishingly small and whether they are responsible for matter's dominance over antimatter in our universe. This makes neutrinos a unique window into exploring how the universe works at the smallest scales.

MicroBooNE’s new results are an exciting turning point in neutrino research. With sterile neutrinos further disfavored as the explanation for anomalies spotted in neutrino data, scientists are investigating other possibilities. These include things as intriguing as light created by other processes during neutrino collisions or as exotic as dark matter, unexplained physics related to the Higgs boson, or other physics beyond the Standard Model.

Neutrinos come in three known types—the electron, muon and tau neutrino—and can switch between these flavors in a particular way as they travel. This phenomenon is called “neutrino oscillation.” Scientists can use their knowledge of oscillations to predict how many neutrinos of any kind they expect to see when measuring them at various distances from their source.

Neutrinos are produced by many sources, including the sun, the atmosphere, nuclear reactors and particle accelerators. Starting around two decades ago, data from two particle beam experiments threw researchers for a loop.

MiniBooNE scientists also saw more particle events than calculations predicted. These strange neutrino beam results were followed by reports of missing electron neutrinos from radioactive sources and reactor neutrino experiments.

Sterile neutrinos emerged as a popular candidate to explain these odd results. While neutrinos are already tricky to detect, the proposed sterile neutrino would be even more elusive, responding only to the force of gravity. But because neutrinos flit between the different types, a sterile neutrino could impact the way neutrinos oscillate, leaving its signature in the data.

But studying the smallest things in nature isn’t straightforward. Scientists never see neutrinos directly; instead, they see the particles that emerge when a neutrino hits an atom inside a detector.

The MicroBooNE detector is built on state-of-the-art techniques and technology. It uses special light sensors and more than 8,000 painstakingly attached wires to capture particle tracks. It’s housed in a 40-foot-long cylindrical container filled with 170 tons of pure liquid argon. Neutrinos bump into the dense, transparent liquid, releasing additional particles that the electronics can record. The resulting pictures show detailed particle paths and, crucially, distinguish electrons from photons.

MicroBooNE’s first three years of data show no excess of electrons—but they also show no excess of photons from a background process that might indicate an error in MiniBooNE’s data.

MicroBooNE ruled out the most likely source of as the cause of MiniBooNE’s excess events with confidence and ruled out electrons as the sole source with greater than 99% confidence, and there is more to come.

MicroBooNE still has half of its data to analyse and more ways yet to analyse it. The granularity of the detector enables researchers to look at particular kinds of particle interactions. While the team started with the most likely causes for the MiniBooNE excess, there are additional channels to investigate—such as the appearance of an electron and positron, or different outcomes that include photons.

Neutrinos are surrounded by mysteries. The anomalous data seen by the earlier MiniBooNE and LSND experiments still need an explanation. So too does the very phenomenon of neutrino oscillation and the fact that neutrinos have mass, neither of which is predicted by the Standard Model. There are also tantalising hints that neutrinos could help explain why there is so much matter in the universe, as opposed to a universe full of antimatter or nothing at all.

Liquid argon will also be used in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, a flagship international experiment hosted by Fermilab that already has more than 1,000 researchers from over 30 countries. DUNE will study oscillations by sending neutrinos 800 miles (1,300 km) through the earth to detectors at the mile-deep Sanford Underground Research Facility. The combination of short- and long-distance neutrino experiments will give researchers insights into the workings of these fundamental particles.

of the has been named among the winners of the .

Announced by the Leverhulme Trust, the prizes are worth a total of £3 million and are awarded to 30 outstanding researchers across the UK, chosen from over 400 nominations.

The Trust offers five prizes in each of the following subject areas: classics; earth sciences; physics; politics and international relations; psychology; visual and performing arts. Professor Boya has been recognised in physics, for her work on unravelling the properties of fluids under atomic-scale confinement, using angstrom-scale atomically smooth capillaries made from 2D materials.

Her research focuses on atomic-scale capillaries constructed out of 2D materials, such as graphene, hexagonal boron nitride, molybdenum disulfide and other layered crystals. Her team investigates properties of gas, liquids, ions and polymers, such as DNA in the ultra-confined 2D capillaries. They have demonstrated frictionless water and gas transport through these capillaries.

Professor Boya said: "I feel honoured being awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize 2021 in Physics, and am quite excited to pursue a project on molecular transport with this award grant."

Now in its 20th year, the scheme commemorates the contribution to the work of the Trust made by Philip, Third Viscount Leverhulme and grandson of William Lever, the founder of the Trust. The prizes recognise and celebrate the achievement of exceptional researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition, and whose future careers are exceptionally promising.

Each prize is worth £100,000 and 30 are awarded annually. They may be used for any purpose that advances the prize winner's research.

(September 15, 2021) says that a faint, fast expanding cloud (or nebula), called Pa30, surrounding one of the hottest stars in the Milky Way, known as Parker’s Star, fits the profile, location and age of the historic supernova.

There have only been five bright supernovae in the Milky Way in the last millennium (starting in 1006). Of these, the Chinese supernova, which is also known as the ‘Chinese Guest Star’ of 1181AD has remained a mystery. It was originally seen and documented by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in the 12^th century who said it was as bright as the planet Saturn and remained visible for six months. They also recorded an approximate location in the sky of the sighting, but no confirmed remnant of the explosion has even been identified by modern astronomers. The other four supernovae are all now well known to modern day science and include the famous Crab nebula.

The source of this 12^th century explosion remained a mystery until this latest discovery made by a team of international astronomers from Hong Kong, the UK, Spain, Hungary and France, including Professor Albert Zijlstra from Swagֱ��. In the new paper, the astronomers found that the Pa 30 nebula is expanding at an extreme velocity of more than 1,100 km per second (at this speed, traveling from the Earth to the Moon would take only 5 minutes). They use this velocity to derive an age at around 1,000 years, which would coincide with the events of 1181AD.

Prof Zijlstra (Professor in Astrophysics at the University of Swagֱ��) explains: “The historical reports place the guest star between two Chinese constellations, Chuanshe and Huagai. Parker’s Star fits the position well. That means both the age and location fit with the events of 1181.”

Pa 30 and Parker's Star have previously been proposed as the result of a merger of two White Dwarfs. Such events are thought to lead to a rare and relatively faint type of supernova, called a ‘Type Iax supernova’.

Prof Zijlstra added: “Only around 10% of supernovae are of this type and they are not well understood. The fact that SN1181 was faint but faded very slowly fits this type. It is the only such event where we can study both the remnant nebula and the merged star, and also have a description of the explosion itself.”

The merging of remnant stars, white dwarfs and neutron stars, give rise to extreme nuclear reactions and form heavy, highly neutron-rich elements such as gold and platinum. Prof. Zijlstra said: “Combining all this information such as the age, location, event brightness and historically recorded 185-day duration, indicates that Parker’s star and Pa30 are the counterparts of SN 1181. This is the only Type Iax supernova where detailed studies of the remnant star and nebula are possible. It is nice to be able to solve both a historical and an astronomical mystery.”

Paper: The Remnant and Origin of the Historical Supernova 1181 AD - Andreas Ritter^1,2, Quentin A. Parker^1,2, Foteini Lykou^1,2,3, Albert A. Zijlstra^2,4, Martín A. Guerrero⁵, and Pascal Le D⁶ Published 2021 September 15 • © 2021. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. , ,  - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac2253 

The duo are joined by fellow University of Swagֱ�� researcher of the Faculty of Humanities, and are among 97 of the UK's most promising science and research leaders being to help commercialise their innovations.

Dr Wolz is a Presidential Fellow at the , part of the , and specialises in cosmology with radio surveys – particularly the mapping of the large-scale structure of the cosmic web via radio emission from cold gas in and around galaxies.

Her project title is 'Mapping the cosmic web with neutral hydrogen during the era of the Square Kilometre Array'. A key goal of cosmology is to understand the accelerated expansion of the Universe, believed to be driven by a force called Dark Energy. Mapping the distribution of galaxies throughout the Universe's lifetime can measure the expansion and help better understand the nature of Dark Energy.

In the past decade a new method called HI intensity mapping has emerged, which uses the radio emission of gas to trace the galaxy distribution. With the support of the UKRI Fellowship, Dr Wolz will prepare the upcoming HI intensity mapping observations by the Square Kilometre Array, the largest radio observatory ever built, and analyse its recent pathfinder data. These new radio surveys will allow for unique insights into the evolution of the Universe, inaccessible to optical telescopes.

She said: "I am incredibly excited and grateful to receive the Future Leaders Fellowship at such a critical time – both in terms of my career and the field of radio cosmology, where first large and high-quality data are now available."

Dr Polacci is a Senior Lecturer in Volcanology in the . Her project is entitled: '4DVOLC: Magma storage and ascent in volcanic systems via time-resolved HPHT X-ray tomographic experiments and numerical modelling of eruption dynamics'.

She said: "I am very happy to be one of the new UKRI Future Leaders Fellows. For the next four years I will combine time-resolved HPHT X-ray microtomography experiments on magma kinetics, numerical modelling of magma ascent and natural observations to study magma storage, ascent and eruption dynamics.

"The outcome of the project will change our current understanding of volcanic processes and volcanic eruptions, and will put the UK into a cutting-edge position for the study and prediction of volcano system behaviour."

Congratulations to both, and the best of luck with their projects!

Clays, like graphite, consist of crystal layers stacked on top of each other and can be mechanically or chemically separated to produce ultra-thin materials. The layers themselves are just a few atoms thick, while the space between layers is molecularly narrow and contains ions. The interlayer ions can be altered in a controllable way by allowing different ion species to penetrate between the layers.

This property, known as ion exchange, allows for control of the physical properties of these crystals in membrane applications. However, despite its relevance in these emerging technologies, the ion exchange process in atomically thin clays has remained largely unexplored.

Writing in , a team led by Professor Sarah Haigh and Dr Marcelo Lozada-Hidalgo shows that it is possible to take snapshots of ions as they diffuse inside the interlayer space of clay crystals using scanning transmission electron microscopy. This allows study of the ion exchange process with atomic resolution. The researchers were excited to find that ions diffuse exceptionally fast in atomically thin clays – 10,000 times faster than in bulk crystals.

Space to move

Complementary atomic force microscopy measurements showed that the fast migration arises because the long-range (van der Waals) forces that bind together the 2D clay layers are weaker than in their bulk counterparts, which allows them to swell more; effectively the ions have more space so move faster.

Unexpectedly, the researchers also found that by misaligning or twisting two clay layers, they could control the arrangements of the substituted ions within the interlayer space. The ions were observed to arrange in clusters or islands, whose size depends on the twist angle between the layers. These arrangements are known as 2D moire superlattices, but had not been observed before for 2D ion lattices – only for twisted crystals without ions.

Dr Yichao Zou, postdoctoral researcher and first author of the paper, said: "Our work shows that clays and micas enable the fabrication of 2D metal ion superlattices. This suggests the possibility of studying the optical and electronic behaviour of these new structures, which may have importance for quantum technologies, where twisted lattices are being intensively investigated.”

New insights in diffusion

The researchers are also excited about the possibility of using clays and other 2D materials to understand ion transport in low dimensions. Marcelo Lozada-Hidalgo added: "Our observation that ion exchange can be accelerated by four orders of magnitude in atomically thin clays demonstrates the potential of 2D materials to control and enhance ion transport. This not only provides fundamentally new insights into diffusion in molecularly-narrow spaces, but suggests new strategies to design materials for a wide range of applications."

The researchers also believe that their ‘snapshots’ technique has much wider application. Professor Haigh added: "Clays are really challenging to study with atomic resolution in the electron microscope as they damage very quickly. This work demonstrates that with a few tricks and a lot of patience from a dedicated team of researchers, we can overcome these difficulties to study ion diffusion at the atomic scale. We hope the methodology demonstrated here will further allow for new insights into confined water systems as well as in applications of clays as novel membrane materials.”

Further reading on membranes

You can read more about research into membranes using advanced materials at Swagֱ�� at the following links:

• Control over water friction with 2D materials towards 'smart membranes'
• Ultra-fast gas flows through tiniest holes in 2D membranes
• Swagֱ��: bringing clean water to the world
• Molymem: Swagֱ�� spin-out brings innovative water filtration tech to market

Advanced materials is one of Swagֱ��’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet. #ResearchBeacons

John was one of the technical pioneers at Jodrell Bank from the early 1960s onwards: he built the 'Doppler Ephemeris Machine' for planetary radar experiments and carried out one of the first (1961) radar determinations of the distance to Venus and hence the Astronomical Unit (as part of his PhD); he measured the rotation rate of Venus using radar in 1964; developed early techniques of synthetic aperture radar for imaging the Moon, and also made important early contributions to techniques of aperture synthesis including Maximum Entropy.

He spent many years designing and building a sophisticated Hydrogen Maser frequency standard at Jodrell Bank, which was used experimentally. John had a fierce intellect which he applied to a wide range of challenging problems - his hand-written one-page notes were brilliantly illuminating. He was a force to be reckoned with and an unforgettable character, and one of the true pioneers of radio and radar astronomy at Jodrell Bank.

John had an illustrious career as both a leading cloud physicist and also an acclaimed, prize-winning poet. He is renowned for a series of groundbreaking discoveries in the field of atmospheric electricity that form the basis of our understanding of charge transfer in thunderstorms to this day, and for his work on the role of clouds in delaying planetary warming due to increasing carbon dioxide.

John hypothesised that when different sized ice particles collide, the one growing fastest by vapour diffusion is charged positively and the other negatively, and these are transported to different parts of the cloud, leading to the development of an electric field and lightning.

His research also explained for the first time how, in warm clouds with no ice, rain could develop in as rapidly as 20 minutes due to mixing of dry air to some regions of the cloud. John recognised very early the importance of global warming and the profound impact it would have on the planet.

His concern led him to propose the idea that marine clouds could be brightened by decreasing the size of individual water droplets, thus increasing the number of cloud droplets for the same mass of water and thereby reducing the amount of heat absorbed by the Earth.

He published this work in Nature in 1990, a concept that is still being actively examined as a potential way of undertaking climate repair. John was awarded the Royal Meteorological Society's L. F. Richardson Prize in 1965, the Hugh Robert Mill Medal in 1972 and the Symons Memorial Medal in 1980. He served as President of the International Commission on Atmospheric Electricity from 1975-1983.

John wrote six collections of poetry, several plays broadcast on Radio 4 and a novel "Ditch Crawl". He won a number of awards for his poetry, including his title poem from "Professor Murasaki's Notebooks on the Effects of Lightning on the Human Body", which was awarded second prize in the UK's 2006 National Poetry Competition.

John was a wonderful wordsmith and was able to bring together science and poetry in an insightful, moving and often humorous way. Latterly, his work explored ageing and memory, so very poignant as his dementia worsened over the last years of his life.

John obtained his PhD from Imperial College under the supervision of Sir B.J. Mason FRS (who later became Chancellor of UMIST) and became a lecturer at UMIST in 1961, becoming Professor and subsequently the Head of Department. He left UMIST in 1988 to work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, USA where he was highly influential and much admired.

He supervised 26 PhD students during his time at UMIST, many of whom are leading atmospheric physicists themselves. His insight, intellectual wonder and enthusiasm were contagious and he inspired many who knew him both as a scientist and as a poet. He enjoyed sport, being a member of the UMIST cricket team, being involved in intramural football and taking part in the annual Bogle Stroll.

John married Ann Bromley in 1961; they were amicably divorced in April 1992. He was predeceased by two sons, Rob and Mike. He is survived by a son and daughter, David Latham and Rebecca Brewer, seven grandchildren (Samuel, Shane, Jessica, Natasha, Molly, James and Evie) and one great grandchild (Tamara), our sincere condolences to his family.

John Latham, scientist, born 21 July 1937; died 27 April 2021.

On Monday 14 June, Nobel Laureate Sir Andre Geim (pictured) will be joining some of the brightest minds on the planet - from industry, government, academia, culture and entertainment – to answer the question: ‘How do we get the next 10 years right?’

Andre is Regius Professor at Swagֱ�� and  with colleague Sir Kostya Novoselov for their groundbreaking work on graphene, the one-atom-thick form of carbon with extraordinary physical properties that is transforming materials science and engineering.

Andre will be speaking at the , the global leadership summit focused on AI and transformational technology. The three-day event runs from 14-16 June and will feature world-leading experts discussing the innovations that will shape the next decade and beyond.

Among other high-profile attendees will be Hollywood actor and investor Robert Downey Jr, legendary musician and philanthropist Nile Rodgers, plus Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age, and Dame Vivian Hunt, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.

Andre will be speaking on the Monday, 14 June, 3:00pm-3:40 pm as part of an in-person session entitled ‘’. The presentation will look to explain how progress in material science could drastically change our physical and digital worlds.

A new class of materials

In a , Andre explained: “Graphene is a new class of materials we were not even aware of just 15 years ago. It was completely hidden from materials science.

“And graphene is not alone, it has many brothers, sisters, cousins, and by now we have probably studied dozens of those, hundreds of those materials.

“If we look at the history of the human race it’s gradually built up from the Stone Age, to the Iron and Bronze ages, etc. We now live in the age of plastics and silicon, so I wouldn’t be surprised that next we will be coming into the age of 2D materials.”

The session will be moderated by Timandra Harkness, a BBC Radio 4 presenter, as well as a writer and comedian.

Graphene@Swagֱ��, the world-leading research and innovation community based at Swagֱ��, will also have a virtual booth at the event where it will showcase how graphene and 2D materials are now going from the lab to market.

Defining the next decade

The CogX Festival gathers the brightest minds in business, government and technology to celebrate innovation, discuss global topics and share the latest trends shaping the defining decade ahead.

The hybrid event will be hosted physically in London's Kings Cross, and is expecting 5,000 attendees in person plus 100,000 virtually, alongside 1,000 speakers, more than 350 virtual exhibitors, three physical stages and 15 virtual stages, making this year's CogX Festival more than double the size of that attended by 44,000 in 2020.

This week (Tuesday 25 May), researchers at Swagֱ��’s National Graphene Institute (NGI) have published a study in  showing a dramatic decrease in friction when water is passed through nanoscale capillaries made of graphene, whereas those with hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) - which has a similar surface topography and crystal structure as graphene - display high friction.

The team also demonstrated that water velocity could be selectively controlled by covering the high friction hBN channels with graphene, opening the door to greatly increased permeation and efficiency in so-called ‘smart membranes’.

Fast and selective fluid-flows are common in nature – for example in protein structures called aquaporins that transport water between cells in animals and plants. However, the precise mechanisms of fast water-flows across atomically flat surfaces are not fully understood.

Co-authors of the study (from left to right): Yi You,Solleti Goutham, Radha Boya and Ashok Keerthi

The investigations of the Swagֱ�� team, led by Professor Radha Boya, have shown that - in contrast to the widespread belief that all atomically flat surfaces that are hydrophobic should provide little friction for water flow - in fact the friction is mainly governed by electrostatic interactions between flowing molecules and their confining surfaces.

Dr Ashok Keerthi, first author of the study, said: “Though hBN has a similar water wettability as graphene and MoS₂, it surprised us that the flow of water is totally different! Interestingly, roughened graphene surface with few angstroms deep dents/terraces, or atomically corrugated MoS₂ surface, did not hinder water flows in nanochannels”.

Therefore, an atomically smooth surface is not the only reason for frictionless water flow on graphene. Rather the interactions between flowing water molecules and confining 2D materials play a crucial role in imparting the friction to the fluid transport inside nanochannels.

Useful in evaporation processes

Professor Boya said: “We have shown that nanochannels covered with graphene at the exits display enhance water flows. This can be very useful to increase the water flux from membranes, especially in those processes where evaporation is involved, such as distillation or thermal desalination.”

Understanding of liquid friction and interactions with pore materials is vital to the development of efficient membranes for applications such as energy storage and desalination. This latest study adds to an increasingly influential body of work from the researchers at the NGI, as Swagֱ�� reinforces its position at the forefront of nanofluidic research towards improved industrial applications for sectors including wastewater treatment, pharmaceutical production and food and beverages.

You can read more about the group’s work at the following links:

• Ultra-fast gas flows through tiniest holes in 2D membranes
• Swagֱ��: bringing clean water to the world
• Molymem: Swagֱ�� spin-out brings innovative water filtration tech to market

Advanced materials is one of Swagֱ��’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet. #ResearchBeacons

The 2021 event – held from 26-30 April and run by PhD students from Swagֱ�� – was hosted virtually due to Covid restrictions but the online platform had the benefit of turning the competition into a truly global affair. 

Thirty-five teams from around the world, including participants from Argentina, India and Indonesia, worked throughout the week on their ideas before pitching to a panel of industry experts.

Alongside the challenge element, the Hackathon team also produced a series of , detailing the uses and deployment of graphene in different fields, from water desalination to computing and space applications.

Attendees also took part in Q&A sessions with experts in graphene research and development, including pioneer and Nobel laureate Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov (below).

The event was hosted at the Bright Building at Swagֱ�� Science Park, generously provided free by Hackathon sponsor Bruntwood SciTech. MC duties were provided by science communicator, comedian and  Dr Luke Chaplin.

In the winners’ circle

First prize in the Healthcare Challenge went to the SENSE team for their smart, chronic wound-monitoring patch. They won £250, plus an additional £100 Innovation Prize, three months’ office space at Alderley Park (also courtesy of Bruntwood SciTech) and an hour’s IP consultancy time with Potter Clarkson.

Winners in the Sustainable Industry Challenege were Honeycomb Ink, with low-cost piezoelectric energy harvesting floor tiles for festivals and public events. They won £250, plus a £65 award from LABMAN Automation.

Other winners included:

• FRAS Sustainable Solutions: retrofitting graphene thermal management for plane wings to prevent ice formation.
• Nanocomb: eTextile muscle movement monitor for elite athletes, dubbed a ‘physio in your pocket’.
• Graphene Prosthetics Ltd: graphene nerve conduction prosthetics to alleviate phantom nerve pain in amputees.
• Hex: mattress topper sleep tracker.

Scott Dean, founder of , was a member of the Hackathon organising team of PhD researchers and said: “Hosting the Graphene Hackathon virtually this year gave us the opportunity to reach further than ever before. 

“We were amazed at the quality of the teams’ ideas, from energy harvesting systems to next-gen wireless chargers and remote health monitoring solutions. Each idea was very different from the next and each enabled by the same material – graphene.

“We are very grateful to our wonderful sponsors for all their support in making this event so successful, and to all the teams for their hard work.”

Scott also thanked the judging panel, featuring senior staff from LABMAN, Bruntwood SciTech, the Henry Royce Institute, Catalyst by Masdar, Nixene Publishing and the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre.

You can view the videos produced for this year’s event at the and find out more at .

The result, announced today, from the experiment at the provides tantalising evidence that the elementary particles called muons are not behaving in the way they are supposed to according to the leading theory of physics – the Standard Model.

Scientists from the UK, funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, have played a vital role in the g-2 experiment.

The Muon g-2 experiment searches for signs of new particles and forces by precisely examining the muon’s interaction with a surrounding magnetic field.

The muon, when placed in the magnetic field, itself acts like a tiny magnetic compass and like a gyroscope, this compass rotates at a certain precise frequency, predicted by the Standard Model.

However, the g-2 collaboration has measured this rotation to be faster than predicted – suggesting that our current understanding of physics is incomplete, and hints at the presence of additional particles or hidden subatomic forces that are manifest in the subatomic quantum fluctuations surrounding the muon.

This result has been anticipated for over a decade, since a measurement published in 2006 from an experiment at Brookhaven National Lab stood at odds with the Standard Model.

The highly anticipated result from Fermilab pushes the precision of the experiment into uncharted territory in the quest to confirm or refute that finding.

Professor Mark Lancaster of Swagֱ�� is the UK lead for the g-2 experiment and an ex co-spokesperson of the experiment.

He said: "This is a long awaited measurement and provides strong evidence that hints at the existence of new particles and forces.

"We know our current list of fundamental particles and forces is incomplete because they are not sufficient to explain the dark-matter content of the universe or that the universe has very little anti-matter.

“This measurement alone has a one in a thousand chance of being a statistical fluke and one in 40 thousand when combined with the previous measurement from Brookhaven. It falls short of the one in a million gold standard used in particle physics to claim a discovery, but we are already analysing much more data that will significantly improve the precision of the measurement by more than a factor of two.”

This result, along with other recent developments including the LHCb result last week (link), could suggest that scientists are on the precipice of a new era of physics.

Professor Lancaster added: “When viewed together with the recent measurements from CERN's LHCb experiment, there seems to be a pattern emerging of muons behaving differently than our theory predicts.

“This measurement is the most precise measurement ever to be made at a particle accelerator: it has an uncertainty of better than 0.5 parts per million.”

is an international collaboration between Fermilab and dozens of labs and universities in seven countries, including the UK.

The UK collaboration comprises the universities of Lancaster, Liverpool, Swagֱ��, and UCL and the Cockcroft Accelerator Institute.

STFC has supported the UK’s role in this experiment since 2014 and UK physicists have had a very significant role in the experiment, providing one of the two main detector systems and one of the experiment’s co-spokespersons from 2018-2020.

The build of the straw tracking detectors at Liverpool was led by Professor Themis Bowcock and Dr Joe Price with data acquisition provided by UCL led by Dr Becky Chislett.

Two former PhD STFC-supported students from the UK now have two of the three largest analysis roles in the experiment. 

Professor Lancaster added: “Liverpool University and UCL provided one of the key detector systems for the experiment and this along with the talent and ingenuity of many young researchers has made this measurement possible.”

outlines applications for this ‘smart surface’ technology range from next-generation display devices to dynamic thermal blankets for satellites and multi-spectral adaptive camouflage.

The devices’ tunability is achieved by a process known as electro-intercalation, which in this case involves lithium ions being interposed between sheets of multilayer graphene (MLG), offering control over electrical, thermal and magnetic properties.

The MLG device is laminated and vacuum-sealed in a low-density polyethylene pouch that has over 90% optical transparency from visible light to microwave radiation.

Charge turns grey to gold

During charge (intercalation) or discharge (de-intercalation), the electrical and optical properties of MLG change dramatically. The discharged device appears dark grey owing to the high absorptivity (>80%) of the top graphene layer in the visible regime. When the device is fully charged (at ~3.8V), the graphene layer appears gold in colour. The achievable colour space can be enriched to include a range from red to blue using optical effects such as thin-film interference.

Professor Coskun Kocabas, lead author of the study, said: “We have fabricated a new class of multispectral optical devices with previously unachievable colour-changing ability by merging graphene and battery technology.

“The successful demonstration of graphene-based smart optical surfaces enables potential advances in many scientific and engineering fields.”

For example, a dynamic thermal blanket could selectively reflect visible or infrared light and allow a satellite to reflect radiation from the side facing the sun, while emitting radiation from its shaded faces. Similarly, when in Earth’s shadow, that blanket can insulate the satellite from deep-space cooling [see figure below]. These actions would regulate internal temperatures far more effectively than a static thermal coating.

Previous studies have examined devices at specific wavelength ranges of , ,  and , using single and multilayer graphene. But it was the challenge of extending coverage to visible light while maintain optical activity at longer wavelength that required innovation in the structure of the device, overcoming established difficulties in the .

“Here we used a graphene-based lithium-ion battery as an optical device,” he added. “By controlling the electron density of the graphene, we are now able control light from visible to microwave wavelengths on the same device.”

Nobel laureate Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov was a co-author on the paper and said: “Few-layer graphene offers unprecedented control over its optical properties through charging. Such devices can find their applications in many areas: from adaptive optics to thermal management.”

 is one of Swagֱ��’s  - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet. #ResearchBeacons

The ORP will provide scientists with access to a wide range of instruments, promote training for young astronomers, and open the way to new discoveries.

The CNRS will be responsible for coordinating the ORP, which is supported by €15 million of funding from the H2020 programme.

Until now, Europe has had two major collaborative networks for ground-based astronomy, one in the optical domain and the other in the radio-wave domain. OPTICON and RadioNet have now come together to form Europe’s largest ground-based astronomy collaborative network. Launched with funding to the tune of €15 million under the H2020 programme, the project aims to harmonise observational methods and tools, and provide access to a wider range of astronomy facilities. The CNRS will coordinate the project, together with the University of Cambridge and the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

Swagֱ�� is a major partner in the project. In particular, the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (part of the Department of Physics & Astronomy) will provide access to the e-MERLIN/VLBI National Facility, operated under contract to STFC. Prof. Simon Garrington and Dr. Robert Beswick will be looking after this ambitious transnational access project, including the development of tools that will harmonise how astronomers gain access to telescopes located across Europe. The JBCA team will also be tasked with helping to develop a strategic plan for astronomy in Europe over the next 5 years, with the goal of realising a new and sustainable relationship between the European Commission, major Funding Agencies and National Observatories.

As our knowledge of the Universe advances, astronomers increasingly need a range of complementary techniques in order to analyse and understand astronomical phenomena. As a result, the European Union has decided to bring together the optical and radio networks OPTICON and RadioNet, who have successfully served their respective communities over the past twenty years.

With €15 million in funding from the H2020 programme, the European astronomy community will now benefit from the formation of Europe’s largest ground-based astronomy network: the OPTICON-RadioNet PILOT (ORP), which brings together some twenty telescopes and telescope arrays.

The ORP network is intended to harmonise observational methods and tools for ground-based optical and radio astronomy instruments, and provide researchers with access to a wider range of facilities, building on the success and experience of the OPTICON and RadioNet networks.

The new programme will make it easier for the astronomy community to access these infrastructures, as well as provide training for new generations of astronomers.

According to the management team*, ‘it is very exciting to have this opportunity to further develop European integration in astronomy, and develop new scientific opportunities for astronomy research across Europe and globally.’

The ORP will in particular foster the development of the booming field of what is known as multi-messenger astronomy, which makes use of a wide range of wavelengths as well as gravitational waves, cosmic rays and neutrinos. Removing barriers between communities by harmonising observation protocols and analysis methods in the optical and radio domains will enable astronomers to work better together when observing and monitoring transient and variable astronomical events.

Astronomers from 15 European countries, Australia and South Africa, as well as from 37 institutions, have already joined the ORP consortium. It will be coordinated by the CNRS, which runs and contributes to several optical and radio telescopes.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004719.

* The management team includes Jean-Gabriel Cuby, ORP project coordinator at the CNRS National Institute for Earth Sciences and Astronomy, and Gerry Gilmore, Professor at the University of Cambridge (UK) and Anton Zensus, Director of the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (Germany), as ORP scientific coordinators for OPTICON and RadioNet respectively.