Physics Department News

Congratulations to Rachel Edwards who has won the Public Engagement Award (Individual) at the University Staff Awards.

"Rachel probably does more outreach activities than any other member of staff in the Physics Department. This almost always involves doing activities in the evenings or at weekends. When she does outreach in the week, because the level of effort falls outside her expected role, it often means that she needs to do additional work outside normal hours just to catch up because she has undertaken outreach. Whilst we expect all staff to do some outreach, Rachel undertakes this with a level of effort and enthusiasm that goes way beyond what we could usually expect or hope for. Without Rachel’s involvement and leadership, many of the outreach events or activities that we have been able to deliver would probably not have happened.”

See http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/insite/uni_awards/winners2017 for a full list of winners from the night.

The quantum Hall effect is a test case for a complex quantum system. The presence of many electrons leads to the formation of highly non-trivial dynamics and so-called collective phenomena. Usually, however, it is the fractional quantum Hall effect at extremely strong magnetic fields where many-body effects take centre stage, leading to the formation of quasi-particles. In a new work [EPL 117, 57009 (2017)], Oswald and Roemer show that already in the integer quantum Hall effect at weaker magnetic fields, the interactions play a dominant role.

The department is delighted to announce that our Athena SWAN silver award has been renewed by the Equality Challenge Unit, for showing continued good working practices and gender equality in the Physics department.

For more information on Athena SWAN see http://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/athena-swan/ and http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/staff/working/juno.

Contact Sue Burrows if you have any questions.

Professor Marin Alexe  has been awarded grants for two research projects in the field of ferroelectricity – which may lead to breakthroughs in nanotechnology, and memory storage in everyday devices.