Congratulations to Dr Rebecca Milot and Dr Matt Kenzie who have both secured European Research Council Starting Grants, following the first call for proposals under the EU's new R&I programme, Horizon Europe.

Dr Rebecca Milot has been awarded €2,473,363 to investigate one of the most promising new materials for solar energy conversion, metal halide perovskites.

Dr Matt Kenzie's award of €1,490,202 will aim to enhance our understanding of the physics underpinning the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe, which is fundamental in explaining how our universe arrived at its present state.

Read more about the research projects.

Listen to Professor Sandra Chapman's inspiring talk as she speaks to Adrian Chiles on BBC5 live radio about her research as Director of Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, and how she became interested in Physics.

You can listen to Sandra on BBC5 live from 02:44:25

The Terabotics project, led by Professor Emma MacPherson, which aims to integrate terahertz technology with surgical robotics to help improve cancer diagnosis and treatment has been shortlisted for the Engineer's Collaborate to Innovate Awards 2021.

Find out more about Emma's Terahertz Research Group. 

Quasi-crystals are often alloys of 2-3 metals with a non-periodic arrangement of atoms. Still, they show the highly-peaked diffraction pattern of crystals while also possessing exotic electronic properties such as self-similar electronic spectra and multifractal wave functions usually associated with disordered materials. The level-spacing statistics of energy levels, P(s), with s the difference of adjacent energy levels, is known to be a marker that can distinguish ordered/periodic/metallic from disordered/non-periodic/insulating materials with ordered materials following a so-called Gaussian ensemble statistics. In a recent paper, Grimm and Roemer have shown that the Gaussian ensemble statistics also holds for quasi-periodic systems. Hence quasi-periodic systems seem to defy the usual classification where only ordered/periodic/metallic should show such a Gaussian statistics.