Departmental news

Caroline Shenton Taylor who was a physics undergraduate has won the UK final of the Fame Lab competition and now will be involved in the international final at the Times Cheltenham science festival. Caroline was one of our undergraduates and did her PhD on Compton scattering under Jon Duffy.

A couple of 3rd year students were good ambassadors for the physics department as they won the recent nPower Energy Challenge competition...

As part of BBC's "Made in the Midlands" the impact of the Science City Project was looked at, Professor Chris McConville discusses increased research co-operation between Warwick and Birmingham Universities and with industries...

A telescope to find thousands of planets beyond our Solar System is the hot favourite for selection as Europe's next medium-class science mission. The mission, known as Plato, should launch on a Soyuz rocket in 2024, with Professor Don Pollacco leading the Plato Science Consortium...

Extra solar planets have come to prominence in the past decade as advanced techniques have begun to detect them in greater numbers. The discovery of Kepler-78b in October 2013 attracted media coverage worldwide, with some reports suggesting the planet had Earth-like properties. But what does that mean? Are we a step closer to finding another habitable environment outisde of our solar system? Lucy Handford spoke to Professor Don Pollacco from the Department of Physics to find out more.

Astronomers have for the first time weighed an Earth-sized planet orbiting another star. Although measuring the radius of exoplanets is relatively straightforward, measuring the planet's mass - and therefore its density, a clue to its composition - is more difficult. The results from two independent teams published in Nature (30 October 2013), one of which a number of UK astronomers, confirm Kepler-78b as the first known Earth-sized exoplanet with an Earth-like density...

University of Warwick physicists could be a step closer to solving the mystery of missing antimatter. They have observed muon neutrino to electron neutrino transformation – a process which could provide a clue to why the Universe has more matter than antimatter...

In 2012, the EPS commissioned an independent economic analysis from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) on the importance of physics to the economies of Europe. The report, using statistics available in the public domain through Eurostat, covers 29 European countries – the EU27 countries, plus Norway and Switzerland. Under examination is the 4-year period 2007-2010, 2010 being the most recent year for which official data are simultaneously available for all these countries.

Warwick Physics Professor Don Pollacco has been on "In Our Time" with Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4.

Robotic telescopes in Chile's Atacama desert will conduct Next Generation Transit Survey to analyse atmospheres for clues.

The art of hunting planets has come so far that astronomers can now list hundreds of alien worlds that orbit stars so faint they are not even visible as pinpricks in the clear night sky.

Little is known of these far-flung planets. The most conspicuous are huge, the size of Jupiter, and scorched from circling so close to their suns. Others are giant iceballs, or waterworlds, or even rocky like Earth. But the finer details are a mystery, the stuff of speculation more than science.

To find out more about these other worlds, a team led by British astronomers is launching an ambitious search for planets that orbit the nearest, brightest stars to Earth. Their aim is to find prime candidates for the most important question of all: is there life elsewhere? Read more...