Physics Department News
Neutrino experiments win big again
Coming hot on the heels of the Nobel Prize award for the discovery of neutrino oscialltions, the Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics 2016 has recognized five collaborations studying neutrino oscillations. One of them, the T2K neutrino oscillation project, has had major contributions from the Warwick T2K group headed by Dr Gary Barker and Dr Steve Boyd.
On November 8, representatives from the five experiments accepted the award in a televised event in the USA...
Understanding the magnetism in lanthanide-transition metal magnets
Prof Julie Staunton's electronic structure calculations that reveal the profound complexity of magnetic interactions in technologically relevant intermetallic materials have been highlighted on the front cover of the latest issue of Physical Review Letters, the world’s premier physics letter journal.
The calculations give a quantitatively accurate description of the diverse magnetism of Cs-Cl (B2) ordered phases of Gd with Zn, Cd, and Mg, which are tested against experimental data and show the complex role played by the spin-polarized valence electrons.
Paving the way for more efficient X-ray detectors
A team including Warwick beamline scientist Oier Bikondoa has published in Nature Photonics a new approach to fabricate more efficient and cheaper X-ray detectors for medical applications. In radiography, the human body is exposed to X-rays and the transmitted intensity is captured by a detector. With more efficient detectors the exposure to X-rays can be reduced...
Researchers find that magnetometers have a social network where they talk about the weather
New research led by physicists at the University of Warwick has used tools designed to study social networks to gain significant new insights into the Northern Lights, and space weather – particularly the interaction of events in the sun’s atmosphere with Earth’s ionosphere.
The research team, led by Prof Sandra Chapman, used data from over 100 individual magnetometers located at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere. These magnetometers have been used for decades to track space weather but it is only recently that the data from all these devices has been collected in one place in the SuperMAG project...