Physics Department News

We celebrate the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics in recognition of the achievements and recent results in gravitational wave research. The three winners made pivotal contributions to the development of the ground-based detector arrays that led to the first detection of gravitational waves from a merging pair of black holes by the advanced LIGO facility in 2015. Members of the Astronomy & Astrophysics group are actively involved in gravitational wave astrophysics, in particular pursuing searches for electromagnetic signatures coincident with gravitational waves and have recently deployed a dedicated facility for this work, GOTO.

After the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 a key question is whether it is the only one. The minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) includes five physical Higgs bosons, three of them neutral. ATLAS has just published a search for a second neutral one decaying to tau pairs, covering a wide mass range above that of the discovered one using data collected in the years 2015 and 2016. This is the most sensitve search for such an MSSM Higgs yet.

We propose a suitable explanation for Germanium Tin epitaxial heterostructures temperature-dependent photoluminescence that is based upon the so far disregarded optical activity of dislocations.

Collaboration between the the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, University of Birmingham and the Warwick XPS Facility has studied the evolution of surface chemistry and the associated wettability of laser-patterned aluminum alloys under abient conditions.