PGR prizes and awards
Many congratulations to the 2024 PGR Thesis Prize winners. Read on for more information about their research and its importance.
SEM Faculty Thesis Prize-Eva-Maria Ahrer
Eva-Maria Ahrer’s PhD thesis focuses on exoplanets and their atmospheres using a method called transmission spectroscopy, where a planet is observed while it passes in front of a star and the atmosphere leaves its spectroscopic imprint on the light from the star. From this, we can identify what the planet’s atmosphere is made of. For her work she uses telescopes at La Silla, Chile but also the recently launched JWST. One part of her PhD thesis describes the Early Release Science (ERS) of exoplanet transits in the first months of operations with JWST. In particular she presented the first JWST observations of an exoplanet with the NIRCam instrument, identifying water vapour in a hot, Jupiter-sized exoplanet. Eva-Maria is now continuing her research at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
Springer Thesis Prize-Tom Killestein
Modern time-domain astronomy is among the most data-intensive sciences, transforming terabytes of data per night into discoveries of supernovae and other exotic cosmic explosions -- only possible with deep learning algorithms that look at the images coming in, which I developed during my PhD for the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer.
In my thesis I present methodologies that scale 'real-bogus classification' to new levels of accuracy, optimise classifiers specifically to recover supernovae well, and minimise the level of human labelling required: all essential for current and next-gen surveys.
Winton Prize -Chris Woodgate
A huge range of materials we use in our day-to-day lives are 'alloys', mixtures of two or more metals (and occasionally other elements) combined to form new materials with desirable physical properties. Some elemental combinations mix freely and form disordered 'solid solutions', while other combinations of elements form regular geometric arrangements of atoms known as 'intermetallic' phases. Historically, much focus has been devoted to alloys containing two, or occasionally three, 'principal' elements, with occasional additions of trace amounts of other elements. However, in the early 2000s, a new class of alloy was reported, the so-called 'high entropy' alloy, in which four or more elements are alloyed in near-equal ratios to form a stable, disordered, single-phase system. These systems are of interest for a range of advanced technological applications, and are also of fundamental physical interest, as they exhibit can phenomena such as superconductivity, quantum critical behaviour, and extreme Fermi surface smearing.
My PhD research, under the supervision of Prof. Julie Staunton in the Theoretical Physics Group, focussed on implementing a novel approach for studying the phase behaviour of these complex systems, which is based on a perturbative analysis of the internal energy of the disordered alloy as described by density functional theory (DFT) and the coherent potential approximation (CPA). We successfully applied the approach to a number of well-studied high-entropy alloys, correctly predicting the experimentally observed phase behaviour at a fraction of the computational cost of rival modelling approaches. Further, we were able to provide fundamental physical insight into the physical origins of atomic ordering tendencies in terms of materials' underlying electronic structure, i.e. the 'glue' bonding the atoms in the material together. As many alloys contain magnetic elements, we also spent some time connecting atomic arrangements in alloys with their magnetism and magnetic properties.
I was extremely fortunate to have been based in the interdisciplinary Centre for Doctoral Training in Modelling of Heterogeneous Systems (HetSys) for the duration of my studies, which exposed me to a wide range of computational modelling techniques and provided endless social and collaborative opportunities. At present, I remain in Julie's group, working as Research Fellow on a joint UK-US project examining the physics of rare-earth-lean and rare-earth-free permanent magnets for energy applications. I am also using this time to explore options for my scientific career moving forwards!
MSc Thesis Prize-Amena Faruqi
My MSc by Research project focussed on modelling the HD98800 double-binary system, simulating a predicted transit in which one binary system will be occulted by the disc encircling the other. This is anticipated to begin over the next few years and presents a unique opportunity to constrain protoplanetary disc properties, since this rare transit will only occur once every 230 years. Phantom SPH code was used to create hydrodynamical models of HD98800 for a range of potential disc parameters. The goal was to consider how properties of the circumbinary disc can lead to observable differences in a light curve of the transit, which may be used to make inferences about the disc once the real transit is observed over the coming years.
