A team including Neil Wilson and Nick Hine has visualised the electronic structure in a microelectronic device for the first time, opening up opportunities for finely-tuned high-performance electronic devices.

Physicists from the University of Warwick and the University of Washington have developed a technique to measure the energy and momentum of electrons in operating microelectronic devices made of atomically thin, so-called two-dimensional, materials.

Using this information, they can create visual representations of the electrical and optical properties of the materials to guide engineers in maximising their potential in electronic components.

The experimentally-led study is published in Nature and could also help pave the way for the two-dimensional semiconductors that are likely to play a role in the next generation of electronics, in applications such as photovoltaics, mobile devices and quantum computers.

Steve Hindmarsh, of the Electron Microscopy RTP, was awarded a prestigious Papin Prize at the HETS (Higher Education Technicians Summit) conference in Birmingham on 25 June.

Steve was given the award for technical excellence in supporting a Core Research Facility – The Electron Microscopy Research Technology Platform.

The award was presented at HETS 2019, which aims to share best practice amongst higher education technical staff in UK, Ireland and beyond, and is the largest event of its kind in the country, with over 700 technicians attending.

Professor Phil Woodruff has been awarded the IUVSTA Prize for Science 2019.

The prize was awarded for "outstanding contributions to deepening our understanding of the structure of surface through the development and application of broadly applicable tools now widely available to the surface science community".

The IUVSTA Prize for Science is given every three years to recognize and encourage outstanding internationally acclaimed experimental and/or theoretical research in the fields of interest to the International Union for Vacuum Science, Technique and Applications (IUVSTA). The prize will be presented at their flagship conference, the International Vacuum Congress (IVC-21) in Malmö, Sweden July 1-5, 2019, where Phil will give a plenary lecture.

A fragment of a planet that has survived the death of its star has been discovered by astronomers in a disc of debris formed from destroyed planets, which the star ultimately consumes.

The discovery, reported in the journal Science, is the first time that scientists have used spectroscopy to discover a solid body in orbit around a white dwarf, using subtle variations in the emitted light to identify additional gas that the planetesimal is generating.