Physics Department News

Congratulations to Max Grell, Chris Lamb, Joseph Pickering and William Hart, members of ‘Team Chivalry’ who represented Warwick University at the 2013 Npower Energy Challenge at the Royal Institution in London on March 18^th. The students applied for the competition by submitting a detailed response to the question ‘How can energy providers engage with customers more positively?’ and then delivered presentations at the quarter final, semi- final and final stages.

For Team Chivalry’s presentation in the final they described a ‘social reward scheme structure’ they had developed based on ‘gamification’ – this would encourage Npower customers to manage their energy use to reduce their bills and to develop social groups to gain rewards by developing community links, parents, for example, could use points they had accrued to buy resources for their local school.

Team Chivalry’s presentation received excellent feedback from the NPower executives on the judging panel for its innovative approach and the quality of their pitch and Max, Chris, Joseph and William were all outstanding ambassadors for their Department and the University. As a result of their achievements all of the students have been offered places on Npower’s Internship programme.

A pair of identical twin brothers with a passion for atom-smashing have both gained PhDs in physics from the University of Warwick. Twenty-six year olds Mark and Leigh Whitehead, originally from Maidstone in Kent, came to the University of Warwick as undergraduate students and both graduated with a first class MPhys in July 2008. The pair stayed on at Warwick to complete PhDs in an area of particle physics which tries to understand the nature of matter in the universe.

They both graduated at a ceremony at Warwick Arts Centre earlier this year. Congratulations!

Warwick Physics Professor Don Pollacco has been on "In Our Time" with Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4.

Robotic telescopes in Chile's Atacama desert will conduct Next Generation Transit Survey to analyse atmospheres for clues.

The art of hunting planets has come so far that astronomers can now list hundreds of alien worlds that orbit stars so faint they are not even visible as pinpricks in the clear night sky.

Little is known of these far-flung planets. The most conspicuous are huge, the size of Jupiter, and scorched from circling so close to their suns. Others are giant iceballs, or waterworlds, or even rocky like Earth. But the finer details are a mystery, the stuff of speculation more than science.

To find out more about these other worlds, a team led by British astronomers is launching an ambitious search for planets that orbit the nearest, brightest stars to Earth. Their aim is to find prime candidates for the most important question of all: is there life elsewhere? Read more...