Many congratulations to Drs Elena Cukanovaite, James Gott and Samuele Ferracin, for their success in the 2021 PhD Thesis Prize competition. Elena won the Winton Prize for Astrophysics, James was awarded the Springer Thesis Prize, while Samuele is the recipient of the Faculty of Science and Department of Physics Thesis prize. Read on for more details about the prizes and their research.

Congratulations to the following members of Physics staff on their promotions:

• David Brown (Senior Research Fellow)
• Aruni Fonseka (Senior Research Fellow)
• Paul Strom (Senior Research Fellow)
• David Armstrong (Associate Professor)
• Anne-Marie Broomhall (Associate Professor)
• Andrew Howes (Associate Professor)
• Elizabeth Stanway (Reader)

All promotions are with effect from 1 August 2021.

What happens at the molecular lever when a photon hits the eye or light shines on a leaf?

Physical processes occurring on nanometre length scales and femtosecond time scales typically undergo complex dynamics involving multilevel quantum systems. Understanding such complex quantum dynamics is a major open challenge. Foremost among them is the dimension of the Hilbert space  involved, which determines the number of parameters necessary for understanding the dynamics. This is typically done by fitting models of various degrees of sophistication to experimental data.