Physics Department News

Edoardo Carnio, 1st year PhD student in the theory group with Prof. Roemer, has been selected to receive the Alumni prize 2015 of Freiburg University, Germany.

Two former Warwick Physics graduates have been presented with prestigious Austrian Science Fund (FWF) START awards by the Austrian Science Minister, Harald Mahrer, as part of the Wittgenstein Festival in Vienna.

Ben Lanyon (BSc 2002, MPhil 2006) will work on “Quantum Frequency Conversion for Ion-Trap Quantum Networks” at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck. Garath Parkinson (MPhys 2003, PhD 2007) has an award for "Unravelling Single-Atom Catalysis: A Surface Science Approach", to be held at the Institute of Applied Physics, TU Vienna.

Only eight of these €1.2M awards are made each year to top young scientists, who can be from any discipline, with the goal of giving the recipients long-term and extensive financial security to build their own research groups over six years.

Water delivery via asteroids or comets is likely taking place in many other planetary systems, just as it happened on Earth, new research by the Warwick Astronomy & Astrophysics group strongly suggests.

Published by the Royal Astronomical Society and led by the University of Warwick, the research finds evidence for numerous planetary bodies, including asteroids and comets, containing large amounts of water.

The research findings add further support to the possibility water can be delivered to Earth-like planets via such bodies to create a suitable environment for the formation of life.

Congratulations to Giorgos Petrou, Jeffrey Ede, Arif Ali and Rajesh Patel, a team of second year physicists who were runners up in the final of the nPower 'Energy Challenge' which was held at Warwick University last week. Over forty teams from universities throughout the UK initially entered the competition and entrants were asked to submit their business proposal to address the challenge of 'How RWE nPower could revolutionise the energy industry'.

The physics students innovative idea was to encourage nPower customers to buy into the provision of renewable energy by investing in 'myTurbine', an initiative where turbines would be crowd funded which would potentially appeal to both investors attracted by the annual dividend they would receive and customers who wanted nPower to commit to a low carbon emission energy supply. The panel of judges were clearly impressed with this imaginative proposal that was well researched and excellently presented. Giorgos, Jeffrey, Arif and Rajesh have all be offered an internship with nPower as a result of their success in the energy challenge.