School of Physics and Astronomy

Congratulations to alumnus Luke Scott who won Converge’s Space Challenge award.

Space Challenge award

Congratulations to MPhys Astrophysics alumnus Luke Scott, who, along with School of Chemistry student Stephen Spice, won Converge’s Space Challenge award. Luke and Stephen co-founded Pleiades Dynamics, a company that specialises in designing and manufacturing affordable liquid rocket engines, with an emphasis on simplicity and versatility. Their win includes a £5,000 prize.

Supporting innovation

Converge works with Scotland's universities to empower staff, students and graduates to transform academic research and innovation into real-world solutions. Since its launch 15 years ago, Converge has supported the creation of more than 500 companies.

Edinburgh success

A number of other University of Edinburgh students and graduates were recognised as winners and finalists at this year’s Converge awards event, working across some of the most exciting frontiers of innovation, from the space sector and industrial biotechnology to AI-powered healthcare.

Researchers have experimentally identified a hydride that exhibits superconductivity below 1 Mbar with a critical temperature above liquid nitrogen.

Superconductors carry electricity with no resistance, but only below a certain temperature known as the critical temperature. This means that for superconductors to function effectively, they must be cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero. Despite over a century of investigating this phenomenon, superconductors are still confined to applications that can justify the high cost of cryogenic cooling, such as MRI scanners, particle accelerators, and the magnets that confine plasma in fusion reactors.

Hydrogen-rich compounds, known as hydrides, show the highest superconducting temperatures achieved to date. Several hydrides can superconduct at temperatures near room temperature, but can only do so under extreme pressures. In order to reach pressures of millions of atmospheres, samples need to be placed between the tips of miniature diamond anvils, making these experiments challenging due to the need for extreme precision and alignment, as well as other factors.

Researchers at the Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions, including members of the School's Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems (ICMCS), have identified a compound that becomes superconducting at 94 GPa (gigapascals) - roughly half the pressure required by most hydride superconductors - and at temperatures of up to 98 K (above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen). This compound is A15 lanthanum hydride, LaH_5.75 – where A15 refers to the specific cubic crystal structure of the compound.

This result marks a new capability for the Centre. Measuring electrical transport in a diamond anvil cell at these pressures requires micron-scale electrodes patterned onto the diamond culet and insulated from the metal gasket, all of which must withstand pressures above one megabar.

Combining synchrotron X-ray diffraction, electrical transport measurements and first-principles calculations, the work shows that superconductivity survives only while the hydrogen sites are almost fully occupied. As the pressure is reduced, the material loses hydrogen, although the A15 crystal structure remains exceptionally stable, down to near-ambient pressure. When the hydrogen content falls below LaH₅, the compound stops being a superconductor and becomes an electrical insulator. This is the first reported example of a superconductor-to-insulator transition caused purely by a change in hydrogen content.

The results help separate two effects that have been difficult to distinguish in hydride superconductors: the role of the crystal structure, and the amount of hydrogen present. They show that, within the A15 crystal structure, it is the amount of hydrogen that determines how the material behaves electrically. This is consistent with the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer theory that explains how superconductivity occurs.

Dr Israel Osmond, first author of the study, said:

A15 lattices show real promise for hosting high-temperature superconductivity, the question is now how we keep the hydrogen in.

Dr Miriam Peña-Alvarez, who led the study, said:

Pressure is currently the tool that lets us make these materials at all. The goal is to reach the same hydrogen networks by chemical means instead, so that the pressure needed is reduced.

The project also involved contributions from the University of Cambridge, and the work was funded through Dr Miriam Peña-Alvarez’s Future Leaders Fellowship.

Transatlantic partnership signed to accelerate fusion energy research, innovation and workforce.

Higher education institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom have established a transatlantic partnership to advance research, skills, and policy in fusion energy.

Signed on 14 September 2026 at the Global Fusion Policy Summit in London, the landmark Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) establishes a collaborative framework between the US-based University Fusion Association and a coalition of 16 UK universities including the University of Edinburgh. The flexible structure of the agreement invites further institutional participation, allowing additional universities to join the initiative in the coming months.

The agreement focuses on critical pillars required to realise commercial fusion energy:

• Research and Innovation: collaborative scientific discovery, technology development, and engineering deployment
• Workforce & Skills Development: multilevel educational and training initiatives designed to build a robust, inclusive, and diverse talent pipeline for the fusion sector over the next decade and beyond
• Economic Impact: promoting entrepreneurship and commercialisation pathways to generate economic benefit
• Policy & Society: advancing science-informed policy and serving the interests of society at large.

Anchored in shared values, the signatory institutions have pledged to uphold high standards of ethics and research integrity while prioritising student and trainee welfare. The framework emphasises collegiality across institutions to support career development, individual wellbeing, and the global fusion research community.

David Capper, Director for New Nuclear Strategy and Fusion Energy, UK Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) said:

Delivering fusion will require collaboration across academia, industry, and government, alongside a strong pipeline of skills and talent. Universities have an important role in making fusion possible which is why we welcome partnerships like the one being forged today.

Matthew Lanctot, Acting Research Division Director, US Department of Energy (DoE), Fusion Energy Services said:

This partnership will strengthen the publicly funded research base that drives fusion innovation while helping develop the talent and technology needed for a competitive private fusion sector. By connecting expertise across the Atlantic, this partnership can help close critical gaps on the path to commercial fusion.

Dr Anna Lisa Varri, Co-Director of the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Plasma Theory, and based in both the School of Physics and Astronomy and School of Mathematics, said:

Barely a year after establishing our Centre for Plasma Theory, we are especially proud to help shape this ambitious international collaboration. We look forward to making the University of Edinburgh a new focal point for plasma research, teaching, and innovation.

Dr Moritz Linkmann, Co-Director of the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Plasma Theory, and based in the School of Mathematics, said:

This collaboration is a significant step forward for the Centre and for both the School of Mathematics and School of Physics and Astronomy. It strengthens Edinburgh's increasing visibility within the global fusion community and will accelerate and facilitate substantive progress on the physics and mathematics relevant to magnetic confinement fusion.

By bringing together leading academic institutions across the Atlantic, this agreement establishes a unified foundation to train the next generation of scientists and engineers, accelerate technical breakthroughs, and strengthen the global fusion energy landscape.

Edinburgh Physics Education Research Group (EdPER) laboratory space officially opens.

The Edinburgh Physics Education Research Group (EdPER) laboratory space has officially opened, providing researchers with a dedicated space to undertake evidence-based research into aspects of physics teaching and learning.

The EdPER group was the first research centre of its kind dedicated to physics teaching and learning in the UK, having been established in 2010.

The aim of the group is to develop and evaluate research-based instructional strategies and understand the student learning experience. Researchers do this by gathering and analysing both quantitative and qualitative data, with a view to improving student learning in physics and related cognate areas.

The laboratory space was officially opened by Prof Paula Heron who conducts research on the development of conceptual understanding in topics including mechanics, electricity, magnetism, and thermal physics at the University of Washington.

Prof Ross Galloway, Head of the EdPER group said:

We are extremely pleased to open this dedicated laboratory space for undertaking studies in physics education. This resource will enable us to perform eye-tracking studies and conduct focus groups, supporting a range of our research activities. We are grateful to the Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems and the School of Physics and Astronomy for supporting this facility, and welcome researchers to get in touch about using this space and learning more about the work of the group.

Combining microscopy techniques reveals the particles in milk without need for prior physical separation.

Have you ever poured milk into your morning coffee or over your cereal and wondered what it would look like under a microscope?

Far from being a simple liquid, milk is a complex suspension containing a mixture of particles including fat globules and casein micelles. Analysing these particles can be challenging because their size distributions overlap, making it difficult for sizing techniques to determine which particles are which.

A team of researchers has tackled this challenge by combining two complementary techniques to characterise the particle-size distribution of milk: Differential Dynamic Microscopy (DDM) and Cryogenic Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (Cryo-FIB-SEM).

DDM is a high-throughput technique that provides volume-averaged particle-size distributions by analysing particle dynamics. While it can reliably identify a bimodal size distribution in milk, it cannot however determine the chemical identity of the different particle populations.

Cryo-FIB-SEM tomography provides three-dimensional images of the sample allowing components that can be distinguished based on image contrast. However data collection is time-consuming, so the number of particles that can be analysed is inherently limited.

The study highlights that these different techniques provide complementary information and insight, providing a more complete picture than each technique can achieve in isolation.

The implications extend well beyond milk. Many industrial suspensions such as foods, personal care products and pharmaceuticals, are multimodal in size and heterogeneous in terms of chemical composition. By combining complementary techniques, their components can be characterised to build a more complete picture of their composition.  

Ice phase with orthorhombic symmetry revealed under high pressure.

H₂O ice is of fundamental importance to all fields of the physical sciences. Existing in the most extreme environments of the universe, ice is found in comets traveling through the cold vacuum of space, and deep within the hot, dense interiors of giant planets. Despite being a simple molecule, ice possesses a complex pressure-temperature phase diagram, with 21 distinct solid phases reported to date.

At room temperature, the picture is far simpler, with only three known solid ices observed upon compression: ice VI, ice VII and ice X. It was predicted almost 30 years ago that beyond ice X there would be an eventual transformation from a crystal with cubic symmetry to one with orthorhombic symmetry, however it has remained elusive and thought beyond experimental capabilities.

Now a team from the Centre for Science of Extreme Conditions (CSEC), a multi-disciplinary group involving researchers from the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems (ICMCS), reports on the discovery of this phase in Nature Materials. Named ice XXII, this phase exists only at pressures around 300 GPa (which is 3 million times atmospheric pressure) and was formed by squeezing water between the tips of two diamond anvils. 

Through a combination of x-ray diffraction, spectroscopy and density functional theory calculations, the team demonstrates that the cubic ice X structure possessing symmetric oxygen-hydrogen bonds continuously distort before the bonds buckle, giving rise to ice XII. 

Given the vast pressure stability regime predicted for ice XXII, current experimental limitations most likely render this the last phase of ice to be discovered at room temperature.

Dr Israel Osmond, first author of the study said: 

Given that water barely scatters x-rays at all, this really is pushing high-pressure crystallography to its absolute limits. It’s a real testament to how far diamond anvil cell techniques have come.

Recalling the moment of the discovery, Dr Ross Howie, co-lead of the study, said:

We ran the sample by chance as we didn’t expect to observe anything – how wrong we were! Exciting discoveries like this don’t happen every day and it is great that so many early career researchers and students involved in the study got to be a part of it.

Dr Miriam Pena-Alvarez, co-lead of the study, said:

Most matter in the universe doesn't exist at the atmospheric conditions we are familiar with but exists under high pressure. This is what drives our lab, and this work in particular: recreating those planetary interiors in house, to provide insight on how one of the universe's most abundant molecule behaves under these extreme pressures.

The project also involved contributions from Professor Andreas Hermann, and the work was funded through the ERC Starting Grant of Dr Ross Howie and Future Leaders Fellowship of Dr Miriam Peña-Alvarez.

Research team uncover quantum stabilized manganese superhydride at extreme pressures.

Over the past 10 years, the application of high-pressure physics has proved an effective synthesis route to produce hydrogen-rich materials that would otherwise be unattainable. Amongst them, so-called metal superhydrides:  hydrogen-rich compounds containing five or more hydrogen atoms per metal atom, many of which exhibit fascinating properties such as high-temperature superconductivity. While superhydrides can form with a number of rare earth metal species, they are a rarity amongst the group IV-XII transition metals - in fact, only a single example, iron hydride (FeH₅), has been reported to date.

In work published in Angewandte Chemie, a research team based in the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems report the synthesis of the second known transition metal superhydride, MnH_7, at pressures above 118 GPa - around 1.2 million atmospheres. Using a tiny sample just 10 micrometers in size (smaller than the width of a human hair), and held between the tips of two opposing diamonds, the team was able to measure various structural and spectroscopic properties. These measurements were accompanied by density functional theory calculations - a method used to obtain the binding energies of materials at an atomistic level. These calculations were useful for determining the number and location of hydrogen atoms within the sample.

Surprisingly, the crystal structure of MnH₇ turned out to be completely different from the phase predicted by theory to be the most stable. This result can be explained by the rules of quantum mechanics. Even at absolute zero temperature, nuclei are not fixed. Instead, they remain spread in a range of positions and retain a specific energy, the so-called zero-point energy. This energy, the lowest possible energy state of the quantum nuclear system, depends on the crystal structure of the compound, and is more important for light elements, such as hydrogen.

In MnH₇, the role of zero-point energy is so important that, once included in the calculations, the previously most stable structure (which features hydrogen molecules) was superseded by the experimentally determined structure (which has hydrogen atoms) as the most stable phase. This suggests that the new superhydride MnH₇ forms because of the quantum nature of the proton within the hydrogen atoms’ nucleus.

The first author of this study is Postdoctoral Research Associate, Dr Mikhail Kuzovnikov. The experimental work was led by Dr Ross Howie and supported by ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant 'MetElOne', whilst the theoretical work was led by Professor Andreas Hermann.

The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment reports a signal that cannot be explained by any known background.

A single particle interaction is the most intriguing signal reported so far by the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter experiment — though researchers say more data is needed before any claim can be made.

Dark matter is thought to make up around 85% of all the matter in the universe, yet it has never been directly detected. Now, a new analysis from the LZ experiment has identified a single particle interaction that researchers have struggled to explain using any known background process. The result falls short of the statistical threshold required to claim a discovery but is the most compelling hint of dark matter the experiment has reported to date.

LZ is an international collaboration of around 250 scientists and engineers. The detector, which uses 10 tonnes of ultrapure liquid xenon to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and operates nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota, USA.

Funded in the UK by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for both construction and operations, ten UK teams play a central role in LZ, including researchers from the University of Edinburgh. The analysis behind this result was led by the LZ group at the University of Bristol and was presented at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan. The paper is available on the LZ Dark Matter Experiment website and has been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

Dr Sam Eriksen, a senior research associate at the University of Bristol and lead author of the study said:

This was a detailed study in a region we hadn’t explored within this dataset, and we spent months of additional effort to understand all the possible causes of background events. We understand our detector and the backgrounds so well that even a single outstanding event, like the one we found, is important. We expect dark matter events to be extremely rare, so only a handful could mark the first detection of WIMP dark matter.

If the event was caused by dark matter, it would point to a WIMP with a mass of at least 200 GeV/c² (gigaelectron volts), or more than 200 times the mass of a proton, interacting with ordinary matter in a way not covered by the simplest theoretical models. The result stands at 2.6 sigma significance, meaning there is roughly a 0.5% chance it could be explained by known backgrounds alone. This is well short of the 5-sigma threshold that physics requires before a result can be called a discovery.

LZ's results so far include the most sensitive dark-matter searches to date, the most significant observation of solar boron-8 neutrinos, and today's result, which could be an early hint of a dark-matter detection. Together, they reflect years of collaborative work across the international team and point to the value of continuing the search with a larger successor experiment.

The UK team is already working with international partners on the next phase: XLZD (XENON-LUX-ZEPLIN-DARWIN), a next-generation rare-event observatory for dark matter detection and neutrino physics, drawing on the double-phase liquid xenon technology pioneered in the UK. The project is currently supported by a UKRI Infrastructure Fund preliminary activity, and the UK is exploring the possibility of hosting the experiment at the Boulby Underground Laboratory.

Professor Alex Murphy, Personal Chair in Nuclear & Particle Astrophysics, at the University of Edinburgh, said:

One of the first to consider the possibility – and perform calculations – of unseen matter in the galaxy was Lord Kelvin, of Glasgow University, way back in 1904. So there’s a lot of history here in the UK. Rather than perhaps being an end to this journey, the interesting event we’ve seen might be a whole new start. It’s especially exciting to think that the Boulby Underground Laboratory could feature highly in whatever comes next.
 

University of Edinburgh researchers in this field also include academic Dr Sally Shaw, postdoctoral researchers Dr Alberto Uson and Dr Sam Woodford, and PhD students Ellie Bishop and Huan Zhang.  They specialise in areas key to the dark matter search – neutron backgrounds and simulations, and more exotic searches for signals from theorised particles such as axions and axion-like particles.

Dr Sally Shaw said:

This is definitely the most exciting thing LZ has seen so far but we’ll need to work hard now to analyse more data to determine if this is a real dark matter signal. If we see more interactions that fit the bill, we’re onto something. We’re intrigued because that ‘something’ would be our first steps in understanding a huge missing piece of the puzzle of our universe!

The Scottish Science Advisory Council announces membership appointments.

Professor of Biological and Soft Matter Physics, Cait MacPhee, has been appointed a member of the Scottish Science Advisory Council (SSAC).

The SSAC is Scotland’s highest-level science advisory body, providing independent advice and recommendations on science strategy, policy and priorities to the Scottish Government. It plays a vital role in ensuring that policy decisions are informed by the latest scientific evidence and expertise.  

Four University colleagues have taken up roles on the Scottish Science Advisory Council. 

Professor Cait MacPhee said:

I am absolutely delighted to join the SSAC. It's a privilege to represent the scientific community and support the development of evidence-informed policies in Scotland.

Three astronomers from the School of Physics and Astronomy have been awarded prizes by a major space telescope consortium, the Euclid Consortium.

With over 3,600 scientists and engineers, the Euclid Consortium (EC) is one of the world’s largest astronomy collaborations. It is tasked with analysing data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid satellite. Euclid is unravelling the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy by mapping galaxies across huge swathes of the sky out to vast distances. The UK is a leading nation within the EC, and Edinburgh scientists in particular play a major role in this historic mission.

At the 2026 annual EC meeting, three Edinburgh astronomers from the School’s Institute for Astronomy were awarded highly prestigious Special Talent and Recognition (STAR) Prizes for their key individual contributions to Euclid.

James Fawcett won the Outreach Award for his outstanding outreach achievements and leadership, becoming the driving force behind Euclid outreach in the UK.

James said: 

Public engagement is an essential part of the scientific process and funding it matters more than ever. I was delighted to win this award, which gave me the opportunity to chat about our outreach efforts in the UK and raise awareness of various projects from the past year. This included partnerships with STFC, Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh Science and Glasgow Science Centre. Our collaborations led to an escape room style workshop for primary schools developed by MSc Science Communication placement students, planetarium show content, temporary exhibitions, online 'Meet the Scientist' style sessions and more.

Alex Hall won the Leadership & Coordination Award for his exemplary leadership of the Weak Lensing Science Working Group and the 3x2pt Pipeline Group, and his passion and dedication to the Consortium. 

Alex commented: 

It is a great privilege to have been awarded this prize by such a prestigious collaboration. The fact that three prizes have been awarded to Edinburgh scientists underscores the high regard held for the Institute for Astronomy by the international research and innovation community. I am very excited to use Euclid’s data to make new discoveries about our Universe, particularly the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

Maria Tsedrik won the Student Award for her exceptional scientific contributions to Euclid’s DR1 theoretical modelling for beyond LCDM cosmologies, and for her broader impact on Euclid DR1 readiness.

Maria said:

I am very grateful to have my work recognised within such an enormous collaboration dedicated to tackling the biggest unsolved mysteries in cosmology. Right now is an extremely exciting time to shed light on the dark sector of the Universe with the power of Euclid, both the instrument itself and the wonderful community of brilliant scientists behind it. I look forward to the scientific breakthroughs that will emerge from this incredible mission in the nearest future!