A group of staff and postgraduate students from the department inspired students and teachers with exciting experiments and interactive games at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham at the end of June.

Congratulations to Dr James Blake, who has been awarded a 3-year fellowship of £365,966 through the STFC early-stage research and development scheme.

Dr Elizabeth Sharp was shortlisted to represent the department at the Global Young Scientists Summit in January, in Singapore.

A series of videos have been developed to highlight the department's research culture.

Our department commits to a positive research culture and to highlight this Dr Sue Burrows and Dr Reza Kashtiban were granted funding from the University's Research Culture Forum with the idea of developing videos of some of our researchers.

A team from the Astronomy and Astrophysics group led by Dr Lauren Doyle attended the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham in June and were one of the most popular stands with students returning again and again to engage with their stall.

Congratulations to Dr Matthew Pearce who has been awarded the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine Thesis Award. Matthew was awarded this for his thesis titled “Applied-magnetic-field studies of f-electron materials."

Matthew did his undergraduate degree at Warwick, before continuing to do his PhD in the Superconductivity and Magnetism Group under the supervision of Paul Goddard. During his PhD he used a variety of experimental techniques including magnetometry (torque, SQUID, VSM and pulsed-field compensated coil), electrical transport (traditional 4-wire and PDO), heat capacity and x-ray scattering. Matthew performed measurements at low temperatures and high magnetic fields, utilising both the in-house facilities in the laboratories at Warwick, as well as international high-field user facilities – where materials can be studied in some of the highest magnetic fields on earth.

Matthew's research focussed in part on Ho₂Ir₂O₇, which belongs to a class of highly frustrated magnetic systems known as spin-ices, which are famous for hosting magnetic monopole quasiparticles. Matthew and his collaborators found that not only do measurements of the electrical resistance in these systems act as an indicator for the density of magnetic monopoles, but also that, mediated by the monopoles on the Ho sublattice, an applied magnetic field is able to manipulate the antiferromagnetic Ir domains, with potential applications to areas such as spintronics. He also studied the compound CeOs₄Sb₁₂, which had previously been found to undergo a valence transition. This is a transition where f electrons undergo a transformation from quasi-localised to itinerant with perhaps the most dramatic example being that of elemental Ce, which is accompanied by a volume collapse often quoted to be as large as 15 %. Matthew and his collaborators mapped out the phase boundary of this transition which exhibited an extremely unusual shape, owing to the influence of locally varying strain within the sample and quantum fluctuations.

Since completing his PhD he has been working at the University of Oxford with Radu Coldea studying quantum magnetism.