Professor Pam Thomas, PVC (Research) and leader of the Ferroelectrics and Crystallography group in the Department of Physics, has been announced as CEO of the Faraday Institution (FI), the research arm of the UK’s £289m national battery challenge, following on from her 30 years as a member of academic staff at Warwick.

A founding member of the Board of Trustees at the FI since 2018, Pam is passionate about addressing the challenges faced by the wider energy storage ecosystem and the UK’s quest towards Net Zero.

X-ray analysis of artefacts from Henry VIII’s warship, the Mary Rose, sheds new light on their construction and conservation. The team included Emeritus Prof Mark Dowsett, his partners in Ghent and used XRD facilities in the Warwick RTP as well as the XMaS beamline. The paper is published in the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation, DOI: /10.1107/S1600577520001812

For the first time scientists have observed muon ionization cooling – a major step in being able to create the world’s most first muon collider. The international Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) collaboration, in which a team led by Dr Steve Boyd at the University of Warwick is a core member, has made a major step forward in the quest to create a muon collider.

Muons are produced by smashing a beam of protons into a target. The muons can then be separated off from the debris created at the target and directed through a series of magnetic lenses. Because of this rough-and-ready production mechanism, these muons form a diffuse cloud – so when it comes to colliding the muons, the chances of them hitting each other and producing interesting physical phenomena is really low.

To make the cloud less diffuse, a process called beam cooling is used. This involves getting the muons closer together and moving in the same direction. Until now, the question has been whether you can channel enough muons into a small enough volume to be able to study physics in new, unexplored systems. This new research, published in Nature, shows that it is possible. The results of the experiment, carried out using the MICE muon beam-line at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) ISIS Neutron and Muon Beam facility on the Harwell Campus in the UK, clearly show that ionization cooling works and can be used to cool muon beams, leaving open the possibility for the construction of new high energy muon colliders and neutrino factories in the future.

More information can be found in Nature volume 578, pages 53–59 (2020)

The clearest and most detailed images of the Sun have been captured by the largest telescope in the world. Just-released first images and videos from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope reveal unprecedented detail of the Sun’s surface, with experts saying it will enable a new era of solar science and a leap forward in understanding the Sun and its impacts on our planet.

Members of the Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics at the University of Warwick are part of a UK consortium, led by Queen’s University Belfast, that developed and supplied the cameras used to takes the images. Funding has been provided by UK Research and Innovation’s Science and Technology Facilities Council.

The Inouye Solar Telescope provides a view of the Sun’s atmosphere that is ground-breaking. The dynamics of the solar surface are revealed at an unparalleled level of quality and detail. The telescope will provide the ladder for a step change in our understanding of how the Sun’s activity manifests itself through flares and eruptions, as well as the flow of energy and matter into the Sun’s corona. The telescope will also play a critical role in understanding space weather.

More information can be found at https://www.nso.edu/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light/ and https://www.nsf.gov/solarscience.

Image credit: NSO/NSF/AURA

A ‘great’ space weather super-storm large enough to cause significant disruption to our electronic and networked systems occurred on average once in every 25 years.This result was made possible by a new way of analysing historical data from the last 14 solar cycles, long before high quality observations became available in the space age since 1957. The analysis shows that ‘severe’ magnetic storms occurred in 42 out of the last 150 years, and ‘great’ super-storms occurred in 6 years out of 150. Super-storms can cause power blackouts, take out satellites, disrupt aviation and cause temporary loss of GPS signals and radio communications.

Chapman, Horne, Watkins, Using the aa index over the last 14 solar cycles to characterize extreme geomagnetic activity is published in Geophysical Research Letters

On 8 September, David Armstrong of the Astronomy and Astrophysics group appeared on the iconic BBC astronomy show "The Sky at Night" to discuss the hunt for exoplanets with host Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

The episode is available on BBC iPlayer until 12 October.

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.