DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY

C. Maher-McWilliams, P. Douglas, P. F. Barker

Laser-driven acceleration of neutral particles

Professor Neal Skipper and Dr Chris Howard, members of the Condensed Matter and Materials Physics group (CMMP), have won the UCL Business Award ‘One to Watch’ 2012.

After more than ten years of work by over 200 engineers, the Mid InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), a camera so sensitive it could see a candle on one of Jupiter’s moons, has been declared ready for delivery by the European Space Agency and NASA. The MIRI Optical System, an instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that will eventually take up a position four times further away from the Earth than the Moon. It will now be shipped to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center where it will be integrated with the other three instruments and the telescope.

J. Xiao, X. Chen, P. V. Sushko, M. L. Sushko, L. Kovarik, J. Feng, Z. Deng, J. Zheng, G. L. Graff, Z. Nie, D. Choi, J. Liu, J.-G. Zhang, M. S. Whittingham,

Dr David Kipping is the 2011 recipient of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Keith Runcorn Prize for the best doctoral thesis in Geophysics.

Prof Gabriel Aeppli, UCL Quain Professor and Director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology has been elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

By Professor Brian R Martin

Professor Jon Butterworth discusses the search for the Higgs boson and plans at CERN beyond this with John Humphreys and Paddy Regan on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme

Dr Giovanna Tinetti, PhD student Ingo Waldmann and Prof. Jonathan Tennyson FRS  talk to Adam Smith at the Pod Academy about their work on exoplanets and NASA’s Kepler mission

Patrick Guio and co-workers

Precise Measurement of the W-Boson Mass with the CDF II Detector,

George Heyland, who died on 6 February 2012 aged 89, was one of the longest serving members of the Physics and Astronomy Department at UCL.

Prof. Ofer Lahav (Astrophysics) is head of the Dark Energy Survey science programme. In this interview for The Economist, he discusses the rapidly expanding universe and the future of dark-energy research.

ESA’s Planck mission has revealed that our Galaxy contains previously undiscovered islands of cold gas and a mysterious haze of microwaves. These results give scientists new treasure to mine and take them closer to revealing the blueprint of cosmic structure.

The new results are being presented this week at an international conference in Bologna, Italy, where astronomers from around the world are discussing the mission’s intermediate results.

Miguel Martinez-Canales, Chris J. Pickard, Richard J. Needs,

Thermodynamically Stable Phases of Carbon at Multiterapascal Pressures

Many congratulations to David Kipping, winner of the 2011 Faculty Postgraduate Research Prize, and to Marian Breuer, winner of the 2011 Faculty Postgraduate Taught Prize.

Dr Giovanna Tinetti (Astrophysics Group) talks about the exoplanet Kepler-22b, and how we can look for signs of life on distant planets.

Dr Hiranya Peiris, a member of the Astrophysics group, has been awarded the 2012 Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Fowler Prize for Early Achievement in Astronomy.

Professor Ofer Lahav, a member of the Astrophysics group, is one of five UCL members of staff to have been awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant Award.

The project will look at ‘Testing the Dark Energy Paradigm and Measuring Neutrino Mass with the Dark Energy Survey'. It is due to commence on 1 May 2012 and is worth 2.4M Euro.

Dr Nguyen TK Thanh has taken part in a scheme where MPs and Civil Servants are paired up with leading scientists for a week at both their respective places of work.

Acceleration in the linear non-scaling fixed-field alternating-gradient accelerator EMMA

Richard D'Arcy and co-workers, Nature Physics, (2012)

On Monday 9 Jan 2012 Head of Department, Prof Jon Butterworth and Research Associate Adam Davison appeared on the BBC 2 Horizon programme 'The Hunt for Higgs: A Horizon Special'. The programme focused on the Higgs particle and why it is significant.

Frédérick Poidevin, P. Bastien, T. J. Jones, ApJ, 741, 112 (2011)

S. A. Chambers, L. Qiao, T. C. Droubay, T. C. Kaspar, B. W. Arey, P. V. Sushko,