Physics Department News

We congratulate the LIGO team on their compelling detection of a gravitational wave signal produced by a pair of coalescing black holes. This represents a remarkable achievement, presenting not only the first detection of a gravitational wave, but also the first detection of a pair of merging black holes.

Dr. Danny Steeghs comments, "A century after Einstein's theory of General Relativity was presented, a long anticipated window on the Universe has now opened. These events also leave visible signatures that we will be chasing up with our new telescope, the Gravitational wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO)."

Numerous scenarios in science and technology require the estimation of vectors such as electric, magnetic, gravitational or other force fields with extreme precision, the fundamental limits to which are set by quantum mechanics. In their latest paper, Tillmann Baumgratz and Animesh Datta show that quantum mechanics allows a more precise estimation of multiple parameters simultaneously rather than individually. The result provides a fundamentally better way estimating vector fields for a fixed amount of resources, and could be used in applications ranging from the study of quantum phase transitions to neuroimaging.

Congratulations to Abidul Hoque for being awarded Outstanding Intern. Abidul Hoque was an intern at the University of Southampton. He was working on the development of a physicsundergraduate teaching laboratory experiment...

Prof. Mark Dowsett was awarded the 2015 Riviere prize at the UK Surface Analysis Forum meeting on Jan 6th. The prize, named for John Riviere one of the greats in electron spectroscopy, is "for work which has been judged outstanding in its continuing and lasting contribution to surface analysis". This lifetime achievement award recognises Mark's development of low...