I have to report the very sad news that Professor John Forty, the founding professor of the Department of Physics, passed away on Sunday 14th May aged 94.

The leading position that the Department holds today is due, in no small measure, to the vision and leadership that John showed in setting up the Department in the 1960s, from his choice of staff and their research areas to the design of a building that has remained "fit for purpose" for many decades, despite the many changes in use that have occurred.

More information will be provided when available.

Mark Newton
Head of Department

The worldwide COVID pandemic was a crisis unparalleled in recent history. The efforts of scientists and researchers around the world in mobilising to find vaccines, treatments, and explanations were equally unparalleled. In this article, we tell the story of one such research collaboration using their collective expertise in protein-modelling to help build a picture of the SARS-CoV-2 virus structure. Moreover, using modern collaborative writing tools, they were able to write up and publish their work during the height of the pandemic.

Congratulations to Dr Karolos Potamianos who has been awarded £287,845 from Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for a research project titled 'Expanding the timing frontier: precision timing for particle tracking and identification.'

The funding will permit the procurement of a 12 GHz signal generator, a fast oscilloscope (<8ps per sample), and a logic analyser. These will enable the proper characterisation of ultra-fast silicon detectors and associated readout at realistic operating conditions, in particular enabling precise measurements of their (ultra-fast) response signals.

The research will be led by Dr Karolos Potamianos. He said,

"The use of fast silicon in collider detectors offers many new opportunities, as high-precision timing information enables distinguish between collisions occurring very close in space but well-separated in time. This will greatly help mitigate the effect of overlapping proton-proton interactions (pileup) at the High-Luminosity LHC. It is thus essential that we can properly characterise these detectors, which the procured equipment will enable. However, challenges such as ensuring proper operation of the detectors in a tough radiation environment and that sufficient bandwidth is available to transfer data out of the detector remain to make these detectors a reality at the LHC.”

On Thursday 9 February, Professor Stuart Croft (Vice-Chancellor) visited the department to present a Warwick wow award to Ally Caldecote (Outreach Officer) and Tishtrya Mehta (post-doctoral researcher) for their continuous hard work and dedication to the annual Christmas Lectures. The Christmas Lectures take place in early December at Warwick Arts Centre, and have been running for 12 years. To date, over 17,000 people have attended.

We spoke to Ally, founder of the Christmas Lectures who said:

"It is an honour to see the appreciation for the Christmas Lectures! They are a labour of love each year with lots of different people coming together to showcase fantastic science and scientists. As a physics department we are deeply committed to sharing what we do with as many as possible and if we can do it wearing Christmas jumpers and Santa hats then that's just a bonus!"

Alongside Ally, Tishtrya plays a pivotal part in the Christmas lectures each year. She said:

"Being a part of the Christmas Lectures Team has been such a highlight of my time at Warwick - I've loved watching the most incredible shows put together by passionate and talented scientists and technicians and learning about the most bizarre and wonderful research, such as the secret life of Brussels sprouts!

It's a joy to see the lectures being awarded and to hear the well earned praise for Ally Caldecote and Paul Warwick (China Plate Theatre) who have been indispensable in making the lectures so full of life and loved by so many."

The wow award celebrates amazing work, projects, and achievements at the University.

Find out more about the university award and watch the video.Link opens in a new window

Professor Sandra Chapman has been awarded the 2023 Johannes Geiss Fellowship of the International Space Science Institute.

The International Space Science Institute at Bern, Switzerland is an Institute of Advanced Study where scientists from all over the world meet in a multi- and interdisciplinary setting to reach out for new scientific horizons. The main function is to contribute to the achievement of a deeper understanding of the results from different space missions, ground based observations and laboratory experiments.

Chapman's research at ISSI during the fellowship will focus on the fundamental physics of plasma turbulence with particular emphasis on recently launched missions - NASA's Parker Solar Probe and ESA'a Solar Orbiter - which will explore the sun's expanding atmosphere- the solar wind - close to the sun, to within the orbit of Mercury, for the first time. Plasma turbulence may provide the answer to one of the outstanding mysteries of the solar system, how the solar wind is heated and accelerated.

One Johannes Geiss Fellowship is awarded each year. The fellowship is named for the founder of ISSI, a distinguished space plasma physicist who pioneered interdisciplinarity.   

The 1st issue of the "Poincare" magazine, written by a team of Maths & Physics UG students, has recently been printed and is now also available online. A wide variety of articles has been included, from knots and topology to an introduction to quantum electrodynamics. Several pages of puzzles and problems are also scattered throughout, including a set of chess puzzles, and a cryptographic cipher for readers to crack.