DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY

Dr Stephen Feeney has been awarded the runner-up prize for the Michael Penston Thesis Prize 2012. This Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) prize is awarded to the best doctoral thesis in Astronomy and Astrophysics; Stephen's thesis was entitled ‘Novel Algorithms for Early Universe Cosmology'.

The kick-off of a large-scale European network for research in 'Thermodynamics in the Quantum Regime' was celebrated in Brussels on Tues 30 April 2013. The successful proposal for one of the prestigious COST network grants, funded by the ESF, was led by UCL's researcher Dr Janet Anders.

 The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer mission (JUICE) will study Jupiter and its large, ice/ocean-bearing moons. JUICE is planned to launch in 2022 and arrive in 2030. Dr Nick Achilleos (Astrophysics) is part of the J-MAG Consortium, an international team of investigators who have successfully proposed one of the 11 scientific experiments to be flown on board this mission.

In a recent STFC newsletter, UK news from CERN, Dr Stephen Hogan describes how he, and a team of international collaborators are investigating the properties of antimatter. The AEGIS experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator, in CERN has been designed to exploit techniques Stephen developed to accelerate antihydrogen atoms in excited states; to transport them and make beams suitable for measurements of the acceleration of antimatter in the Earth's gravitational field.

Supercomputer awards for UCL researchers

New protocol advances solutions for more efficient teleportation - the transport of quantum information at the speed of light.

Dr Janet Anders talks to Professor Jim Al-Khalili on the BBC Four documentary "Order and Disorder". Their discussions focus on information theory and Maxwell's demon.

The UCL High Energy Physics (HEP) research group in UCL Physics & Astronomy has been awarded £4,340,016 from the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for experimental particle physics research through to 2016.

Dr Anna Holin, a current member of the High Energy Physics (HEP) group has been awarded one of the five Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships. Additionally Dr Andrew Pilkington has been awarded a University Research Fellowship and will join the HEP group in January 2013. Anna will be researching the properties of the neutrino and Andrew those of the Higgs boson.

 Congratulations to Dr David Bowler on recieving the 2012 Departmental Teaching Prize. Determined by student nominations, the Departmental Teaching Prize is awarded annually to a member of staff for their outstanding teaching.

Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. On 12 September, that ancient starlight found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly-constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, captured and recorded it for the first time.

Congratulations to Dr Meera Parish on being awarded the Maxwell Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics "(f)or her pioneering work in the theory of cold fermionic matter and magnetotransport in highly disordered media.". Meera is a member of the Condensed Matter and Materials Physics (CMMP) group and the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN).

The scientific community is celebrating one of the most significant achievements for several decades. The search for the Higgs boson has been conducted at CERN's Large Hadron Collider by the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Results were presented on the 4th July 2012, showing a clear 5 sigma observation of a new particle decaying, as is predicted by the Standard Model Higgs boson.