Departmental news

Congratulations to two postdocs in the Warwick ATLAS group, Dr Tim Martin and Dr Elisabetta Pianori, who have been awarded ATLAS Outstanding achievement awards. The awards were made for "enthusiastic and vigorous dedication to the implementation and commissioning of the complex ATLAS Run-2 trigger menu". More information on the ATLAS group at Warwick can be found here:
 
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/research/epp/exp/atlas
 
In the photo Elisabetta is third from the left and Tim is second from the right, pictured with other award winners and the Collaboration Board chair, Howard Gordon, on the left, and ATLAS spokesperson, Dave Charlton, on the right.

Two former Warwick Physics graduates have been presented with prestigious Austrian Science Fund (FWF) START awards by the Austrian Science Minister, Harald Mahrer, as part of the Wittgenstein Festival in Vienna.

Ben Lanyon (BSc 2002, MPhil 2006) will work on “Quantum Frequency Conversion for Ion-Trap Quantum Networks” at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck. Garath Parkinson (MPhys 2003, PhD 2007) has an award for "Unravelling Single-Atom Catalysis: A Surface Science Approach", to be held at the Institute of Applied Physics, TU Vienna.

Only eight of these €1.2M awards are made each year to top young scientists, who can be from any discipline, with the goal of giving the recipients long-term and extensive financial security to build their own research groups over six years.

We warmly welcome some of Professor Jennifer Wren’s research group, who occupy desks on level 3 in MAS. The group is called Warwick FIRE (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/research/thermofluids/warwickfire).

Emeritus Professor George Rowlands, who first came to Warwick in 1966, has clocked up more than six decades of research in theoretical physics - and he believes it’s the challenge of tackling complex scientific problems that has helped keep him young at heart.

Between 2-7 September 2012, Warwick has successfully hosted the Advanced Summer School in Solar Physics. The School was sponsored by STFC and organised by Dr Erwin Verwichte. 26 PhD students and early-career postdocs from the UK and abroad benefited from a series of lectures in all areas of Solar and Heliospheric Physics, taught by leading lecturers in the field. These included the local expertise of Dr Chris Brady, Dr Claire Foullon, Prof Valery Nakariakov and Dr Erwin Verwichte from the Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics (CFSA) in Physics. A special thanks goes to Ms Taherah Nureen, who was the School's secretary. The School's website contains lecture handouts and photos from the event: http://www.warwick.ac.uk/asssp12.

On Tuesday 6th December the Physics department held a Christmas Lecture for the public. Teachers, school children and individuals interested in physics made up the 160 people who were excited to hear Daniel Scully talk about his research into neutrinos. Addressing a packed lecture theatre, he explained what different neutrino experiments look for, and the results from CERN that caught the headlines around the world. Together they considered the staggering implications if these results were confirmed and exactly why they caused such a sensation.

The talk was very enthusiastically received with 30 peopple queuing to ask Daniel questions at the end.

The feedback from the public was overwhelmingly positive, with Daniel's excellent communication skills and infectous enthusiasm, inspiring the audience. "Terrific" and "superb" were amongst the feedback.

Daniel has been inundated with requests to speak at further events, such as Cafe Scientifique, local schools and amateur astronomy groups.

If you missed Daniel's talk, you can watch it here.

Volker Keinhorst, a PhD student in the microscopy group, will become the first Warwick postgraduate to take up an industrial placement within the Midlands Physics Alliance Graduate School (MPAGS) scheme when he starts work in Banbury with Paintbox UK Ltd at the end of July. The aim of the placement will be to help Paintbox develop their automobile painting process including micro analysis via FIB SEM studies of paint/substrate interfaces.

This placement was made possible through the industrial contacts of the Science City Research Alliance. More information about the MPAGS Industrial Placements is available on-line and any students interested in taking part in this scheme should contact David Leadley.

The University is pleased to announce the second call for the Santander Research Grant Fund. Santander Universities is making available £11,600 in 2010-11 to support research visits and conference attendances by postdoctoral researchers to one of the following countries/territories: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain, Uruguay and Venezuela.

See http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/insite/newsandevents/notices/santander_research_grant/