Congratulations to Donna Strickland, Gerard Mourou and Arthur Ashkin on winning the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for ground-breaking inventions in the field of laser physics. Strickland and Mourou found a way to generate high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses using chirped pulse amplification. Ashkin created optical tweezers that have had enormous impact on biological systems.

Congratulations to Michael Pounds, who has been appointed as a fellow of the Warwick International Higher Education Academy from 2018/19.

A WIHEA Fellowship recognises and rewards outstanding achievements in learning and teaching.

Michael joins Gavin Bell as WIHEA representatives from Physics.

Dominic Branford and Animesh Datta, working in collaboration with Haixing Miao (University of Birmingham), have published a paper on the fundamental quantum limits of optomechanical sensors in Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.110505). Being able to measure very weak forces is central to many applications, such as the direct detection of gravitational waves and monitoring subterranean movement of magma in volancially-active areas. The strength of a force can be inferred through its effect of displacing a mass: the displacement can be sensed by illuminating it with a laser and observing the reflected light, a case of optomechanical sensing. In this work, Dominic, Haixing and Animesh study the best precision attainable by optomechanical sensors when multi-coloured light is used.