As part of the Warwick Christmas Lectures 2019 we held an optics-packed pre-show, featuring demos about some of the weird and wonderful properties of light. Members of the Physics Department and Ultrafast & THz group explained important phenomena like fluorescence, infrared light, polarisation and diffraction and more! The "twangs" of the Department's laser harp helped provide some festive music. There were 1100 members of the public at the lecture, a lot of whom made it to the pre-show science bonanza. On stage James talked about the power of lasers, ably assisted by Edward the Elf (below). Thanks to everyone who helped make the Christmas Lecture on 26th Nov such as success! More pictures here...

Photo © Michelle Tennison

This year's spooky group social featured the tera-s of Warwick Castle at Halloween. Highlights included the bird show, battlement climb and delving into the dungeon.

Hannah's first paper presents "A Robust Protocol for In Vivo THz Skin Measurements" and has just appeared in J. Infrared MM THz - check it out here!

Over 900 physicists, chemists, engineers and biologists have descended on Paris for 1 week to discuss the latest science and technology in the infrared, mm-wave and terahertz bands of the spectrum. At IRMMW-THz 2019 the Warwick THz team, and Emma's team at CUHK, have 13 talks and posters, including Emma's plenary on THz instrumentation and analysis techniques for biomedical research, and Becky's keynote about Sn-containing hybrid perovskites for photovoltaics.

The summer conference season has started! Connor, Maurizio and Maria are presenting our recent work on THz polarisation control, carrier cooling in metal halide perovskites, and negative photoconductivity in carbon nanotubes over the next three weeks at Cleo Europe in Munich, Condensed Matter and Quantum Materials in St Andrews, and UK Semiconductors in Sheffield.

A very warm welcome to Eric Hu, who has started his PhD on carbon nanotubes, supervised by Jeremy Sloan in Microscopy and James.

Congratulations to Daniel Coxon on winning first prize in the poster competition at Warwick Chemistry's ChemContext event. Daniel is working on defects in Diamond at the Warwick Centre for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and presented a poster titled "The Crystal Maze".

Thanks to everyone who attended the UK THz Workshop last week! We had a packed schedule of talks, over 30 posters, and 100 attendees from across the UK and beyond. Many congratulations to our Poster competition prize winners:

Congratulations to our poster prize winners: Reshma Anamari Mohandas (Leeds) and Peter Karlsen (Exeter) won the postdoc prize; Luana Olivieri (Sussex), Connor Mosley (Warwick), Lucy Hale (UCL) and Matt Reeves (Bath) won the PhD prize.

A joint collaboration between the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Warwick has developed an efficient and broadband modulator of THz radiation. By reflecting THz radiation from a conductive, gated graphene layer the team have shown that the amplitude of THz radiation pulses can be modulated by more than 99%. Further, phase modulation was acheived by working above Brewster's angle. The findings are described in a recent article in Nature Communications, and are described in an article in Physics World.