Luke Smith, final year PhD student in the Ultrasonic Group was announced as the winner of the György Striker award for best paper from someone under 35 years old, at the 2024 IMEKO World Conference.

PhD student Syl Shaw and supervisor Rudo Roemer apply the real-space renormalisation group method to the Chalker–Coddington model of the quantum Hall transition. This approach provides a convenient numerical estimation of the localisation critical exponent, ν. Previous such studies found ν=2.39 which falls considerably short of the current best estimates by transfer matrix (2.593) and exact-diagonalisation studies (2.58). By increasing the amount of data 500 fold they can now measure closer to the critical point and find an improved estimate 2.51. This deviates only 3% from the previous two values and is already better than the 7% accuracy of the classical small-cell renormalisation approach from which their method is adapted.

Areej Aljaghwani, a 2^nd year PhD student from Maksym Myronov’s Semiconductors Research Group was awarded second place in the Phil Buckle Research Communication Competition held during the UK Semiconductors Conference in July 2024.