Recent Outreach Activities

Congratulations are offered to:

• Anne-Marie Broomhall and Dmitri Veras on their promotions to Senior Research Fellow
• Richard West on his promotion to Principal Research Fellow
• Rachel Edwards, Yorck Ramachers and Neil Wilson on their promotions to Reader

The LHCb collaboration has just published in Phys. Rev. Lett. the first observation of a class of rare decays of a baryon containing the b quark. Studies of particles containing the b quark are of great interest as they provide opportunities to investigate asymmetries between matter and antimatter. Current and previous experiments have made detailed investigations into b mesons, but there is much less information available concerning b baryons. Observation of this new class of decay modes shows that it will in future be possible to make detailed studies of matter-antimatter asymmetries also with baryons, which may help to address one of the big mysteries in science today -- why a small amount of matter, that makes up our observable Universe today, survived from the symmetric conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang.

Heterostructures combining multiple 2D materials are key to exploiting the promise of these novel materials in technological devices. New work involving investigators from the Department of Physics (Hine & Wilson) has investigated the unusual electronic structure effects at the interfaces formed when different transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) materials such as MoSe₂ and WSe₂ are combined.