The School has announced the student recipients of medals and awards at an online ceremony.
Congratulations to students who received medals, certificates, prizes and scholarships at the School of Physics & Astronomy online Undergraduate Student Awards Ceremony.
The Head of School, Prof Jim Dunlop, announced the awards in recognition of excellent performance and achievements in the last academic year. Joint winners of the John Laing Scholarship, Ioannis Hadjifrangiskou and Marios Giannakou, provided some motivational and welcoming words.
Certificates & Medals
181 pre-honours students received Certificates of Merit for their achievement in Physics and Mathematical Physics courses in years 1 & 2. A total of 29 Class Medals were awarded to the students with the highest overall mark for their degree programme.
Prizes and Scholarships
17 Prizes and Scholarships were awarded. These are awarded to the undergraduate students who have achieved the highest results and in their subject area.
Congratulations to Graham Brown (MPhys Mathematical Physics) who won the Tait Prize, the Tait Medal and the Mathematical Physics Integrated Master Medal.
Prize recipients also include the following who have completed their BSc degree:
Ramsay Prize (highest degree classification - BSc Astrophysics): Michael Sharp
Schlapp Prize (highest degree classification - BSc Mathematical Physics): Christos Kourris
Margarett Ann Stewart Prize (highest degree classification - BSc Theoretical Physics / BSc Computational Physics ): Tommaso Bruggi (BSc Theoretical Physics)
Neil Arnott Prize (highest degree classification - BSc Physics programme area) – Nicholas Conceicao (BSc Physics and Music)
Prize recipients include the following who have completed their MPhys degree:
Emerson Prize (highest degree classification - MPhys Astrophysics): Sean Johnston
Dewar & Ritchie Prize (highest degree classification - MPhys Theoretical Physics / MPhys Computational Physics): Scott Conn (MPhys Theoretical Physics)
Neil Arnott Prize (highest degree classification - MPhys Physics programme area): Chin Yi Tan (MPhys Physics)
Many congratulations to all recipients.
It had been proposed that merging black holes observed with gravitational waves formed not from dying stars but in the very earliest moments of our Universe. However, a new analysis has provided evidence against this hypothesis and the possibility that dark matter consists entirely of ‘primordial’ black holes.
All matter was created in the first few moments following the Big Bang. It has long been speculated that black holes, extremely dense regions of space with a gravitational pull so strong not even light can escape, could also have formed in this primordial maelstrom. These primordial black holes may hold the solution to the ‘dark matter’ problem of astronomy, providing an invisible source of gravity throughout space and time.
Black holes can also form when massive stars collapse under their own weight at the end of their life. Astronomers expect that the Universe contains a large population of these ‘stellar’ black holes, which until recently could not be observed directly. The new field of gravitational wave astronomy has given us a unique new window onto the physics of black holes.
The first direct detection of gravitational waves was made in September 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo observatory. These waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time, emitted by a pair of black holes spiralling into each other and eventually merging to form one large black hole. The waves travel across space unimpeded and can be detected on Earth with highly sensitive detectors.
A recent study led by a University of Edinburgh researcher has used measurements of black hole masses from LIGO-Virgo to test the primordial or stellar origin of these gravitational wave sources. The team used advanced statistical techniques to confront different predictions for the observed masses against the data, comparing scenarios in which all sources are either primordial or stellar black holes. They found that a model in which all black holes were primordial failed to match the detailed shape of the black hole mass distribution, with simple stellar merger predictions strongly favoured.
As a by-product of their analysis, the team was also able to rule out 100% of the dark matter being primordial black holes, with such a model producing many more merger events than observed. The new study instead limits this fraction to at most 7%. This result suggests that dark matter must be a new particle or force not predicted by standard physics.
Dr Alex Hall, a Senior Research Associate in the School of Physics and Astronomy who led the study, said:
Our results are strong evidence against all of the observed merging black holes being primordial in origin, and instead suggest that at least some of the sources must be the stellar black holes of standard astrophysics. Our work also demonstrates the remarkable power of this new data set when analysed within a rigorous statistical framework. With hundreds of new detections expected in the next few years, the potential of using gravitational waves to study the physics of the early Universe is extremely exciting.
The study has been published in Physical Review D.
An international research team have discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planet-like objects, orbiting around each other from a very large distance. Although these objects look like giant exoplanets, they formed in the same way as stars, proving that the mechanisms driving star formation can produce rogue worlds in unusual systems deprived of a Sun.
Star-forming processes sometimes create mysterious astronomical objects called brown dwarfs, which are smaller and colder than stars, and can have masses and temperatures down to those of exoplanets in the most extreme cases. Just like stars, brown dwarfs often wander alone through space, but can also be seen in binary systems, where two brown dwarfs orbit one another and travel together in the galaxy.
The research was led by Clémence Fontanive from the University of Bern (who completed her PhD at the School’s Institute for Astronomy in 2019), Prof Beth Biller from the School’s Institute for Astronomy and scientists from Bucknell University.
They discovered a curious starless binary system of brown dwarfs. The system CFHTWIR-Oph 98 (or Oph 98 for short) consists of the two very low-mass objects Oph 98 A and Oph 98 B. It is located 450 light years away from Earth in the stellar association Ophiuchus. The researchers were surprised by the fact that Oph 98 A and B are orbiting each other from a strikingly large distance, about 5 times the distance between Pluto and the Sun, which corresponds to 200 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The study has just been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Extremely low masses and a very large separation
The pair is a rare example of two objects similar in many aspects to extra-solar giant planets, orbiting around each other with no parent star. The more massive component, Oph 98 A, is a young brown dwarf with a mass of 15 times that of Jupiter, which is almost exactly on the boundary separating brown dwarfs from planets. Its companion, Oph 98 B, is only 8 times heavier than Jupiter. Components of binary systems are tied by an invisible link called gravitational binding energy, and this bond gets stronger when objects are more massive or closer to one another. With extremely low masses and a very large separation, Oph 98 has the weakest binding energy of any binary system known to date.
Discovery thanks to data from Hubble
Researchers discovered the companion to Oph 98 A using images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Brown dwarfs are only visible in infrared light. This is because they are very cold and emit very little light, and the stellar association in which the binary is located, Ophiuchus, is embedded in a dense, dusty cloud which scatters visible light.
Because brown dwarfs are cold enough, water vapor forms in their atmospheres, creating prominent features in the infrared that are commonly used to identify brown dwarfs. However, these water signatures cannot be easily detected from the surface of the Earth. Located above the atmosphere in the vacuum of space, Hubble allows to probe the existence of water vapor in astronomical objects.
An atypical result of star formation
The Oph 98 binary system formed only 3 million years ago in the nearby Ophiuchus stellar nursery, making it a newborn on astronomical timescales. The age of the system is much shorter than the typical time needed to build planets. Brown dwarfs like Oph 98 A are formed by the same mechanisms as stars. Despite Oph 98 B being the right size for a planet, the host Oph 98 A is too small to have a sufficiently large reservoir of material to build a planet that big. Therefore Oph 98 B, like its host, must have formed through the same mechanisms that produce stars.
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Congratulations to Dr Stewart McWilliams who has been awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant.
The European Research Council (ERC) awards consolidator grants each year to mid-career researchers who want to consolidate their independence by establishing a research team and continuing to develop a successful career. Funding will create jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff working in the grantees' research team, and enable grant recipients to tackle some of the current big scientific questions.
Dr Stewart McWilliams has been successful in receiving a consolidator grant to support his research in Transport in the Interior of the Earth from Modelling and Experiments.
Stewart studies high pressure and high temperature states of matter in the laboratory to address questions of scientific and technological interest. He is interested in materials relevant to natural systems such as planetary interiors and to technologies such as energetic materials and inertial confinement fusion. He works on developing and using ultrafast methods to create, sustain, and study extreme states. These techniques use the diamond-anvil cell (static compression) and laser-driven shock compression (dynamic compression) to generate particular extreme states. Stewart is based in the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, and is part of the University’s Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions.
The 327 laureates awarded the 2020 ERC Consolidator Grants will carry out their projects at universities, research centres and companies in 23 different countries across Europe, including 50 projects in the United Kingdom. The funding, worth in total €655 million, is part of the EU’s current research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020.
Congratulations to Prof Sinead Farrington who is named 2021 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom Laureate in Physical Sciences & Engineering
The Blavatnik Awards recognize and support outstanding young scientists and engineers. Talented young academic staff across the UK are nominated by their university or research institution, or by members of the Blavatnik Awards UK Scientific Advisory Council.
The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom celebrate the past accomplishments and future potential of the UK’s most innovative young faculty-rank (academic staff) scientists and engineers working in the three disciplinary categories of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemistry. The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the UK are generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and independently administered by the New York Academy of Sciences.
Prof Farrington is based in the School’s Particle Physics Experiment research group and she works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. She received the Blavatnik Award in recognition of her leadership of an international working group at CERN that has improved our understanding of the properties of the Higgs boson, and the development of key trigger and analysis techniques for the exploitation of Large Hadron Collider data and searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model.
Prof Farrington commented:
High energy physics is a collaborative endeavour involving very talented individuals from around the world, working together to build machines on a grand scale, and to analyse the data they generate to help us understand how the universe works at its deepest levels. I am privileged to have been able to contribute to this endeavour and to help provide some pieces of nature’s great puzzle, and am honoured to have received this Blavatnik Award.
The 2021 Blavatnik Awards in the UK Laureates and Finalists will be honoured at an awards ceremony in London in June 2021 and a symposium at the New York Academy of Sciences in July 2021.
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Congratulations to Prof Murray Campbell who has been presented with a lifetime achievement award from the European Acoustics Association.
Prof Murray Campbell is a Senior Professorial Fellow and Professor Emeritus at the School of Physics and Astronomy. He is also a founding member of the University’s Acoustics and Audio Group.
The European Acoustics Association (EAA) works to promote the development and progress of acoustics in its different aspects, its technologies and applications. The EAA award for lifetime achievements in acoustics is issued every 3 years to someone who has demonstrated outstanding scientific and/or industrial achievements in the field of acoustics.
The medal was due to be presented at the opening ceremony of the triennial EAA Forum Acusticum congress in France in April 2020, but this was postponed to a virtual event this December.
Prof Campbell works on the physics and acoustics of musical instruments.
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Congratulations to three researchers: Dr Adam Carnall, Dr Catherine Hale and Dr Tilman Troester, who have been awarded Early Career Fellowships.
The Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowships are intended to assist those at a relatively early stage of their academic careers to undertake a significant piece of publishable work.
All three researchers are based in the School’s Institute for Astronomy.
Galaxy evolution
Adam will be investigating the metal contents of very distant massive galaxies, observed as they were 9 billion years ago (4 billion years after the Big Bang). This information will provide critical insights into the most important processes driving their evolution. He will use data from his recent 8-night observing programme, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory, Chile.
Dark matter influence
Catherine will be using the properties and clustering of galaxies from state-of-the-art, deep observational surveys at radio frequencies to investigate how the evolution of galaxies is influenced by their dark matter environments. Radio surveys are particularly useful for her work as they can observe galaxies across large periods of the history of the Universe without obscuration from intervening dust. Extragalactic radio surveys also observe two interesting galaxy populations which may evolve differently: those which are forming stars and those which host powerful accreting supermassive black holes.
Universe expansion
What is the origin of the accelerated expansion of the Universe? The coming decade will see the advent of a new generation of galaxy surveys that will measure the positions and shapes of billions of galaxies and help us answer this. The full exploitation of these data sets is however restricted by our limited understanding of the non-linear processes that contribute to the formation of galaxies, as well as the insufficient sophistication of our statistical inference methodologies. Tilman will pursue a multidisciplinary research programme at the interface of cosmology, machine learning, and statistics. In order to extract the full non-linear information contained within galaxy surveys he will analyse the clustering of galaxies using novel deep learning (DL) techniques. These techniques will then be adapted to efficiently account for galaxy formation in dark matter-only simulations. To enable robust statistical inference on these massive data sets, he will develop methods to efficiently estimate posteriors in high-dimensional parameter spaces.
Congratulations to Dr Elton Santos who has been awarded the Charles Hatchett Award from the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining.
The Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) presents a range of awards, medals and prizes to recognise personal achievement, for published work and for contributions to the profession. The Charles Hatchett Award is in recognition for the best paper on the science and technology of niobium and its alloys.
Dr Santos is based in the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems. His research focus on the theory and computational modelling of the chemical and physical properties of energy materials, such as organic-inorganic perovskites, two-dimensional layered compounds, and advanced functional solids for catalysis. His research in novel catalysts predicting the existence of a new type of Niobium(Nb)-based compound (i.e. Nb1+xS2) as well as the explanation of its outstanding catalytic properties for hydrogen evolution (HER) has been recognised with the 2020 Charles Hatchett Award.
Such catalysts can revolutionize the way HER can be performed in real applications, e.g. production of high purity hydrogen for fuel cells. Nb1+xS2 is inexpensive to be fabricated but is as efficient as platinum (Pt), presently the best catalyst for HER but the most expensive. This is a step forward: a non-metal-based catalyst which can be used for different chemical processes involving low-cost materials, which is precisely the holy grail of catalysis. In particular, the findings report large current densities, comparable to those attained in the production of hydrogen using very expensive (£50/g) and scarce catalysts like platinum. With prices going down to a few pennies per gram, this could be a game-changing approach.
Dr Santos’s prize will be awarded at the online 2020 IOM3 Premier Awards ceremony on 3 December 2020.
Charles Hatchett (1765 – 1847) was a wealthy London coachbuilder, amateur scientist, distinguished chemist and the discoverer of niobium in 1801. Niobium (element 41) is used in steels, superalloys, intermetallic materials and Nb alloys, as well as in composites, coatings, nanomaterials, optoelectronic devices and catalysts.
The long-held belief that the Milky Way, the galaxy containing Earth and the solar system, is relatively static has been ruptured by fresh cosmic insight.
Studies have found that the spiral-shaped disc of stars and planets is being pulled, twisted and deformed with extreme violence by the gravitational force of a smaller galaxy – the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Scientists believe the LMC crossed Milky Way’s boundary around 700 million years ago – recent by cosmological standards – and due to its large dark matter content it strongly upset our galaxy’s fabric and motion as it fell in. The effects are still being witnessed today and should force a revision of how our galaxy evolved, astronomers say.
The LMC, now a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, is visible as a faint cloud in the southern hemisphere’s night skies – as observed by its namesake, the 16th century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Previous research has revealed that the LMC, like the Milky Way, is surrounded by a halo of dark matter – elusive particles which surround galaxies and do not absorb or emit light but have dramatic gravitational effects on the movement of stars and gas in the universe.
Using a sophisticated statistical model that calculated the speed of the Milky Way’s most distant stars, the University of Edinburgh team discovered how the LMC warped our galaxy’s motion. They found that the enormous attraction of the LMC’s dark matter halo is pulling and twisting the Milky Way disc at 32 km/s or 115,200 kilometers per hour towards the constellation Pegasus.
To their surprise they also found that the Milky Way was not moving towards the LMC’s current location, as previously thought, but towards a point in its past trajectory. They believe this is because the LMC, powered by its massive gravitational force, is moving away from the Milky Way at the even faster speed of 370 km/s, around 1.3 million kilometres per hour. Astronomers say it is as if the Milky Way is trying hard to hit a fast moving target, but not aiming very well. This discovery will help scientists develop new modelling techniques that capture the strong dynamic interplay between the two galaxies.
Astronomers now intend to find out the direction from which the LMC first fell in to the Milky Way and the exact time it happened. This will reveal the amount and distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way and the LMC with unprecedented detail.
Dr Michael Petersen, lead author and Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Physics and Astronomy, said:
Our findings beg for a new generation of Milky Way models, to describe the evolution of our galaxy. We were able to show that stars at incredibly large distances, up to 300,000 light-years away, retain a memory of the Milky Way structure before the LMC fell in, and form a backdrop against which we measured the stellar disc flying through space, pulled by the gravitational force of the LMC.
Professor Jorge Peñarrubia, Personal Chair of Gravitational Dynamics, School of Physics and Astronomy, said:
This discovery definitely breaks the spell that our galaxy is in some sort of equilibrium state. Actually, the recent infall of the LMC is causing violent perturbations onto the Milky Way. Understanding these may give us an unparalleled view on the distribution of dark matter in both galaxies.
The study, published in Nature Astronomy was funded by UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Consolidated Grant and support from Martin Weinberg for usage of the EXP code.
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Congratulations to Davide Michieletto who has been awarded a 2020 Chancellor’s Rising Star Award from the University.
Chancellor’s Awards
The Chancellor’s Awards are one of the most important ways in which the University recognises current members of the University community who have made outstanding contributions to teaching or research, and achieved national and international recognition for their work.
The Rising Star Award honours an early career colleague who has made a significant contribution in their field. Dr Davide Michieletto is a recipient of this award in recognition of his impact in the research in the field of topological control of soft materials.
Biophysics and soft matter
In his short time as a researcher, Davide has already built an international reputation in understanding how the topology of biological and synthetic polymers affect the macroscopic properties of complex fluids and soft materials, and has an impressive publication record. This is an area which is seeing a tremendous interest especially from the younger generations of physicists. Davide’s infectious passion for science and his highly interdisciplinary research projects are attracting numerous and strong students (from BSc to PhD) keen to work in this new exhilarating field at the interface of soft matter and molecular biology. Davide is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, based in the School of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine.