Physics Department News
Threading between ring polyers - towards a topological glass.
Ring polymers interpenetrate and “pin” one-another’s motion. To what extent do concentrated solutions, or melts, of ring polymers thread through one another at equilibrium? An analogous system is a well-shaken bucket full of very long rubber bands. If one attempts to withdraw a single rubber band it is very likely that a large tangle of interpenetrating rubber bands will instead emerge. This is to be contrasted with an attempt to withdraw a single strand from a bowl of freshly cooked spagetti, analogous to a system of linear polymers.
Schools Physicist of the Year Awards 2016
Coventry and Warwickshire schools were all invited to nominate their best year 11 and year 12 Physics student and on Monday 6th June they came to the University and were awarded a prize by Professor David Leadley (sponsored by The Ogden Trust).
They saw demonstrations, met physicists and had a talk from Dr Rachel Edwards.
High order local and nonlocal correlations for 1D strongly interacting Bose gas
The correlation function is an important quantity in the physics of interacting quantum systems such as, e.g. ultracold quantum gases, because it provides information about the quantum many-body wave function beyond a simple density profile. We explicitly calculate the local correlation functions in terms of interaction strength and symmetry phase at zero, low, and intermediate temperatures. We also express the leading order of the short distance non-local correlation functions 
of the strongly repulsive Bose gas in terms of the wave function of M bosons at zero collision energy and zero total momentum. These general formulas of the higher-order local and non-local correlation functions of the 1D Bose gas provide new insights into the many-body physics.
Citation: EJKP Nandani et al 2016 New J. Phys. 18 055014
Faculty Thesis Prizes
Congratulations to David Chapman, Tom Machon and Davide Michieletto who have been awarded 2016 Faculty of Science PhD Thesis Prizes for their exceptional research on Probing the dynamic response of dense matter with x-ray Thomson scattering, Aspects of Geometry and Topology in Liquid Crystalline Phases, and Topological Interactions in Ring Polymers, respectively.