Recent Outreach Activities

Congratulations to two postdocs in the Warwick ATLAS group, Dr Tim Martin and Dr Elisabetta Pianori, who have been awarded ATLAS Outstanding achievement awards. The awards were made for "enthusiastic and vigorous dedication to the implementation and commissioning of the complex ATLAS Run-2 trigger menu". More information on the ATLAS group at Warwick can be found here:
 
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/research/epp/exp/atlas
 
In the photo Elisabetta is third from the left and Tim is second from the right, pictured with other award winners and the Collaboration Board chair, Howard Gordon, on the left, and ATLAS spokesperson, Dave Charlton, on the right.

A team including Warwick authors Geetha Balakrishnan and Monica Ciomaga Hatnean have discovered the existence of an unusual insulating state in the Topological Insulator SmB₆. The unusual state was inferred from observing quantum oscillations in magnetic torque measurements at high magnetic fields, which depended crucially on the high quality single crystals of SmB₆ prepared at Warwick.

The paper "Unconventional Fermi surface in an insulating state" can be read in full in the online journal Science (http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa7974 ).

Published in the journal Nature, a team including Warwick astronomer Peter Wheatley has discovered a giant comet-like tail of hydogren gas evaporating from a Neptune-sized exoplanet. The gas is thought to be boiled off by X-rays from the parent star and then swept away by radiation pressure. The tail was revealed in Hubble Space Telescope observations in which 56% of the star is covered by the tail in ultraviolet light. The planet is losing its atmosphere at a rate of 1000 metric tonnes per second, having narrowly escaped total evaporation by the intense X-ray irradiation it suffered when its parent star was young and active. Read the Warwick press release, the full journal article in Nature, or the preprint from ArXiv.