Congratulations to Jordan Marsh who has won the Institute of Physics Nuclear Physics Thesis Prize.
Jordan Marsh, who was based in the Nuclear Astrophysics group within the School’s Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, has recently completed his PhD, and has won the Institute of Physics (IoP) Nuclear Physics Thesis Prize.
His research focused on the installation and commissioning of the CRYRING Array for Reaction Measurements (CARME), a charged particle detection array which is located at the CRYRING storage ring in GSI, Germany. CARME is designed to study nuclear reactions using storage rings, which is a new and unique methodology to perform nuclear physics experiments, with the aim to resolve long standing problems in astrophysics. CARME is now ready for its exciting future physics programme following its commissioning, which was completed by studying the reaction of a deuteron beam incident on a nitrogen gas target.
The Institute of Physics prize is awarded annually for exceptional work carried out as part of a PhD thesis project in the field of nuclear physics.
Study suggests how biological fluids balance motion while protecting structure.
Biology is continually driven by motor proteins and other active machinery that gives biomaterials such distinct properties. This intrinsic activity keeps living systems away from equilibrium (i.e. not dead), generates structure, and powers movement. It is known that spontaneous, collective motility naturally arises in active fluids. However, these collective flows tend to exhibit a form of disorderly ‘active turbulence’ which chaotically mixes biological materials. On the other hand, biological functionality requires that self-organised structures are protected — we wouldn’t want our internal organs to be mangled whenever we go for a stroll! So how is it that active flows can be disorderly while simultaneously preserving self-organised structure?
To investigate this, researchers from the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, along with collaborators from ESPCI Paris-Tech in France, focussed on an experimentally realisable active film composed of biological filaments (microtubules) and motor proteins (kinesin). When the motor proteins burn biochemical fuel, they actively push the filaments to orient and flow.
While most of the filaments align, the orientation field is riddled with points where the orientation is suddenly singular. These singular points are called topological defects and activity causes pairs of defects to be continually created and annihilated—similar to electron/positron pair creation/annihilation. Active systems are different in that the activity causes the positive defects to be self-motile, zipping around the system until they annihilate.
It was previously noted that self-motile defects tend to be found at the edge of vortices. However, we compared the vorticity and strain rate at each point in the film and discovered that defects are not simply found near vortex edges; rather, they are tightly constrained to be found exactly on lines where vorticity and strain rate perfectly balance. The team were able to explain this spontaneous self-constraint between defects and mesoscale coherent flow structures through the existence of ‘bend walls’ — elongated narrow kinks in the orientation, akin to Néel walls in magnets. Positive defects move along the bend walls, which themselves actively drive flows with balanced vorticity and strain rate.
The findings indicate that defects are not simply points, despite being topological singularities. Rather they are just one part of larger structures involving defects, bend walls and coherent flows. The self-constraint discovered suggests how biological systems may balance motion while protecting functional structures.
Dr Tyler Shendruk, School of Physics and Astronomy commented:
This was an exciting and fast-moving project. It started as an exploration of different ways to quantify flow structures that rapidly led to surprising results. Fortunately, we quickly established an international collaboration that involved wonderful experimentalists and other computational physicists. The collaboration tested our predictions and established just how general our conclusions are.
PhD student Louise Head, School of Physics and Astronomy said:
We are excited to see the future work that can arise from our discovery that the dynamics of topological defects are interwoven with bend walls and lines of simple shear.
Funding received to understand factors such as communicative need, social aspects and learning biases.
A collaboration involving physics and linguistics researchers has received a British Academy Talent Development Award which will be used to make new discoveries about a core aspect of human behaviour and cognition.
Professor Richard Blythe from the School of Physics and Astronomy and Professor Robert Truswell and Dr Dan Lassiter, who are both based in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, have teamed up to lead the study.
The grant will support the application of methods and models from statistical physics to the historical corpora of language use to understand the origins of grammatical structure in human language.
A major roadblock in disentangling these factors lies in the sparsity of historical data: some grammatical changes unfurl over a millennium or more, and contemporaneous records dwindle as one looks further back in time.
The funding will bring together world experts in handling such data at a two-day workshop to be held at the University of Edinburgh in May. This in turn will provide the team with the knowledge they need to make future discoveries about the aspects of human behaviour and cognition that are responsible for the languages we use being structured as they are, and why very different languages can show similar structures.
The British Academy is funded by the UK government, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to support the Talent Development Awards scheme. The aim of the scheme is to promote the building of skills and capacities for current and future generations, including in core areas like quantitative skills, interdisciplinarity, data science, digital humanities and languages.
Find out about the School of Physics and Astronomy MSc programmes
The School of Physics and Astronomy Online Information Sessions will consist of presentations and Q&A sessions on the following days:
• Thursday 22nd February 2024 : Introduction to MSc Astrobiology and Planetary Sciences, 12:30-13:30 GMT
• Thursday 22nd February 2024: Introduction to MSc Mathematical Physics and MSc Theoretical Physics, 14:00-15:00 GMT
• Thursday 22nd February 2024: Introduction to MSc Particle and Nuclear Physics, 15:30-16:30 GMT
Come along to find out more about our programme structure and courses and meet our MSc Directors.
To book a place please fill our Booking Form.
Scientists unlock the potential of carbon nitrides, which have potential for technological advancements in fields such as materials science, electronics and optics.
Predictions
Ever since the seminal paper by Liu and Cohen in 1989, carbon nitrides have been a holy grail of materials science. Liu and Cohen's predictions of a fully saturated polymeric C3N4 solid with exceptional mechanical properties potentially surpassing diamond in hardness, fuelled years of research, yet no credible claims of such materials were reported.
Now, a multinational team of scientists, led by Dr Dominique Laniel from the Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions of the University of Edinburgh, and including researchers from the University of Bayreuth (Germany) and the University of Linköping (Sweden), has finally achieved the unfulfilled promise of Liu and Cohen's vision.
Subject to extreme condition
The researchers subjected various carbon nitrogen precursors to incredibly high pressures between 70 and 135 gigapascals (GPa), with 100 GPa corresponding to 1,000,000 times the atmospheric pressure, combined with temperatures above 2000 K achieved in laser-heated diamond anvil cell experiments. The samples were then characterized by single-crystal X-ray diffraction at three particle accelerators, the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF, France), the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY, Germany) and the Advanced Photon Source (APS, United States). From these measurements, the synthesis of four carbon nitrides could be evidenced: oP8-CN, tI14-C3N4, hP126-C3N4, and tI24-CN2, featuring the necessary building blocks for ultra-incompressibility and superhardness, i.e. fully saturated C and N atoms, forming corner-sharing C(CN3) or CN4 tetrahedra. The crystal structure of these compounds are shown in the figure below. Remarkably, all four compounds can be recovered to ambient pressure and temperature.
Properties and applications
With experimental incompressibility between 365 and 419 GPa and calculated superhardness values between 78.0 and 86.8 GPa, these carbon-nitrogen compounds exceed the hardness of cubic boron nitride (c-BN) and closely approach that of diamond. Further calculations and experiments suggest additional remarkable properties, including photoluminescence, high energy density, piezoelectricity, and non-linear optical properties.
The potential applications of these ultraincompressible carbon nitrides are vast, positioning them as ultimate engineering materials akin to diamond. Their impact spans across numerous natural sciences fields, from materials science to electronics and optics, with use as high-endurance ‘smart’ cutting tools, protective coatings (e.g. for spaceships), and optoelectronic devices (e.g. solar cells and photodetectors).
The research team’s work has been published in Advanced Materials.
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Celebrating the successful launch and stunning first astronomical images produced by the Euclid satellite, sharing the science, and meeting the team behind the project.
Euclid Satellite
The European Space Agency’s flagship Euclid Dark Energy Satellite was launched on 1st July 2023 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies across more than a third of the sky. Its mission is to explore how dark energy and dark matter have shaped the evolution of our Universe.
Edinburgh input
Astronomers and developers from the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Astronomy are playing a leading role in work associated with the Euclid satellite, including defining its scientific goals, designing its observations, developing its data processing methods, hosting the UK’s Euclid Science Data Centre, and carrying out the scientific analysis.
Celebration event
To celebrate Euclid’s successful launch and to discuss the science behind its first astronomical images, the Edinburgh Euclid team held an event with scientists, politicians, local school pupils and media contacts.
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Congratulations to Professor Alexander Morozov who has received the 2023 Annual Award from The British Society of Rheology.
Professor Alexander Morozov has been awarded the 2023 British Society of Rheology Annual Award for his work on linear and nonlinear instabilities of elastic and viscoelastic fluids.
Professor Morozov is based in the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems. His research interests are in soft condensed matter, and include flow instabilities and the transition to turbulence in Newtonian and complex fluids, and active matter.
The British Society of Rheology is a charitable society which promotes the science and the dissemination of knowledge in the areas of pure and applied rheology.
The Annual Award recognises a significant contribution to rheology based on scientific merit. As award winner, Professor Morozov Alexander will present the Society’s award lecture which will be on ‘Elastic turbulence in parallel shear flows: Recent progress’.
Researchers from several universities have completed an innovative study which firmly links the structure of microgels, small networks of stimuli-responsive polymers, to the controlled release of liquid droplets coated in these particles. The discovery could revolutionise methods of targeting medicines to specific locations within the body.
Emulsions
Emulsions consist of numerous droplets that are present in a liquid without dissolving and mixing with the liquid. For example, milk consists of fat droplets stabilised by milk proteins that are dispersed in water. In many applications such as medicine delivery, it is important to not only maintain the droplet structure but also to be able to control when the droplets release their contents. This is because the encapsulated active ingredients in the droplet should only be released once the medicine has entered the body.
Microgels
In this study, researchers stabilised emulsions using temperature-sensitive microgel particles which form a thin protective shell around a droplet and adapt their shape to the ambient temperature. At room temperature, the microgel particles swell in water, but above 32°C, they shrink and the droplet is released into the surrounding liquid. Researchers have now revealed the underlying mechanism behind this process.
Understanding the mechanism
The team, which includes researchers from the University of Edinburgh, University of Gothenburg, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, ETH Zürich and the Osaka Institute of Technology, have revealed that the fundamental mechanism behind stimuli-responsive emulsions are morphological changes of the stabilizing microgels.
The stabilising microgels can be regarded as both particles and polymers. The particle character leads to a high stability of the emulsion, while the polymer character makes the microgels responsive to external influences leading to controlled release of the droplets. Achieving temperature-sensitive emulsions necessitates a delicate balance, requiring a minimal particle character for stability and a substantial polymer character for rapid and reliable release of the droplets.
Tailored emulsions
Pharmaceutical research on targeted medicines focuses on delivering medication in a higher concentration to specific diseased areas of the body rather than affecting the entire body, and responsive emulsions hold great potential for this.
Dr Marcel Rey, who worked at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh and recently moved to the University of Gothenburg, said:
Although additional research is needed, the future looks promising, and advancements can be expected over the next 10 years.
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Congratulations to Dr Tiffany Wood and School start-up Dyneval who received an Institute of Physics Business Start-Up Award.
Dyneval received an Institute of Physics (IOP) Business Start-Up Award for developing an innovative analyser for the precise measurement of semen quality to improve the efficiency of livestock production.
The IOP Awards recognise the achievements of individuals and teams in all aspects of physics. The Business Start-Up Award celebrates young companies with a great business idea founded on a physics invention, with the potential for business growth and significant societal impact.
Dyneval was founded in April 2020, with the Dynescan Semen Analyser launched in the veterinary sector in 2022, providing the first quality control standard for semen quality assessment that can be used by anyone across the livestock production industry.
The underlying technology is based on the application of advanced physics to extract parameters describing the swimming behaviour of microorganisms such as spermatozoa from the fluctuations in intensity of light passing through a sample.
The average UK dairy farmer is losing £37,000 per year due to the 20 per cent drop-in conception rates over the past 40 years. The Dynescan helps vets and farm technicians identify poorly motile and damaged semen before use and thereby improve conception rates to improve the profitability of farming while reducing the environmental impact of protein production from livestock.
Longer-term, the team at Dyneval plan to strengthen commercial opportunities and export abroad to generate new datasets concerning male livestock fertility at a global level to guide data-driven decisions for sustainable outcomes.
Congratulations to Max Huisman and Giorgia Palombo who received prizes for their posters at the International Soft Matter Conference 2023.
Based in the Soft Matter Physics team at the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, both Max Huisman and Giorgia Palombo are in year 3 of their PhD. Max’s research is on the influence of polymers on water evaporation, specifically related to the evaporation of respiratory droplets and virus transmission, and created a poster titled ‘Humidity insensitive evaporation of concentrated polymer solutions’. Giorgia’s research centres around designing and characterising active DNA-based hydrogels with modulable viscoelastic properties through the use of proteins, and her poster was titled 'Protein-Functionalised DNA Nanostar Hydrogels’.
The International Soft Matter Conference brings together researchers to exchange ideas, initiate discussions and report on results relating to soft matter physics. A team of Edinburgh researchers travelled to Japan for the 2023 event.
