School of Physics and Astronomy

Professor Steve Tobias appointed Tait Chair of Mathematical Physics.

Professor Steve Tobias has been appointed the next Tait Chair of Mathematical Physics and will commence his post in June 2025.

Fluid dynamics

Professor Tobias’ research examines the dynamics of turbulent fluids and plasmas and their interaction with magnetic fields. Such interactions are important for our understanding of the behaviour of fluids in planets, stars and galaxies – but also in magnetically confined fusion devices. The interactions take place on a vast range of spatial and temporal scales and so novel mathematical and theoretical insights and computational methods are required for progress to be made. Recent progress has also utilised Machine Learning techniques to complement the theoretical progress.

Professor Tobias completed his PhD in Applied Mathematics in 1995 at DAMTP, Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Nigel Weiss FRS. He was then elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in Mathematics in 1996, before 2 years as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. In 2000 he moved to the Department of Applied Mathematics in Leeds, where he was Founding Director of the Leeds Institute for Fluid Dynamics in 2018.

Tait Chair of Mathematical Physics

The identification of Mathematical Physics as a discipline distinct from physics and mathematics in Edinburgh began in 1922 when the Tait Chair of Natural Philosophy was established using the Tait Memorial Fund endowment. The Chair was named after Peter Guthrie Tait, a close colleague of William Thomson and James Clerk Maxwell, and the intention was thus that it should be devoted to the teaching of mathematical physics. In 1966, it was renamed and is now called the Tait Chair of Mathematical Physics. Professor Tobias is the sixth holder of the Tait Chair, following Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of the eminent naturalist), Max Born, Nick Kemmer, David Wallace, and most recently Richard Kenway.

Professor Tobias said:

I am absolutely delighted and honoured to take up the Tait Chair in Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh. The School of Physics and Astronomy in Edinburgh is one of the leading schools nationally and internationally, and it is a privilege to be asked to lead research and teaching in nonlinear dynamics, fluids and plasmas here. I am looking forward immensely to working with the exceptional colleagues and students at Edinburgh.

Congratulations to Gill Maddy, who works as a Staffing & EDI Officer in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and received a Staff Experience award at the inaugural College of Science and Engineering Staff Awards event last week.

Gill was nominated for the variety of work she carries out which has a positive impact on staff experience in the School. She leads a Parent and Carer network and has also established a Menopause Support network, raising awareness of menopause in the workplace. She often organises informal coffee and cake social gatherings to celebrate important events, to welcome new staff or simply to reinforce team spirit.

The College-wide event took place to celebrate some of the people who add incredible value to their School or department.

The Staff Experience award celebrates those who have positively impacted staff experience through initiatives or working practices to help improve staff wellbeing.  

Congratulations to Dr Franz Herzog who has received a European Research Council Consolidator Grant.

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced recipients of its 2024 Consolidator Grants. These grants aim to support outstanding scientists and scholars as they establish their independent research teams and develop their most promising scientific ideas. The funding is provided through the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.

Collider physics

Dr Herzog’s research interests focus on high-order perturbative calculations in Quantum Chromo Dynamics and its applications in collider physics.

The grant will be used to improve theoretical predictions for producing Higgs bosons, electroweak bosons, top quarks and jets as created in collisions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. To accomplish these highly challenging calculations a novel methodology is proposed to develop asymptotic series expansions based on new insights in Feynman graph theory.

Recognising the outstanding work of PhD students.

The School awards annual prizes to postgraduate research students who have produced the best PhD thesis in each of the research areas. The prizes come with a cash award of £1000 (split if multiple winners). The prizes were awarded in 2024 for research work successfully defended in 2023.

Higgs Prize for the best PhD thesis in Theoretical Physics:

• Ivan Lobaskin (Condensed Matter and Complex Systems)

Institute of Astronomy PhD thesis prize joint winners:

• Ryan Begley
• Massi Hamadouche

Institute of Particle and Nuclear Physics PhD thesis prize joint winners:

• Jordan Marsh (Nuclear Physics)
• Matteo Sergola (Particle Physics Theory)

No prize was awarded for the best PhD thesis in the Institute of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems this year.

Many congratulations to all recipients.

Ion decay sheds light on solar neutrino flux.

Detecting neutrinos

The Sun, the life-sustaining engine of Earth, generates energy through nuclear fusion while releasing a continuous stream of neutrinos—particles that serve as messengers of its internal dynamics. Although modern neutrino detectors unveil the Sun’s present behaviour, significant questions linger about changes in the sun’s release of neutrinos over the course of its existence.

To address these uncertainties, the LORandite EXperiment (LOREX) stands as the final bastion of neutrino geochemical projects. This low-energy solar neutrino detector aims to measure solar neutrino flux averaged since the formation of the sun.

Ion decay

Neutrinos produced in our Sun interact with thallium (Tl) atoms, present in the lorandite mineral (TlAsS2), and convert them into lead (Pb) atoms. The isotope 205Pb is particularly interesting due to its long half-life time of 17 million years, making it essentially stable over the 4 million years timescale of the lorandite ore. As it is currently not feasible to directly measure the neutrino cross-section on 205Tl, researchers came up with a clever method to measure the relevant nuclear physics ingredients: they exploited the fact that fully ionized 205Tl81+ spontaneously decays by bound-state beta decay to 205Pb81+, delivering the information needed for the determination of the neutrino cross section.

The international team discovered that the half-life of 205Tl81+ beta decay was measured as 291 (+33/-27) days. The experiment was only possible thanks to the unique capabilities of the Experimental Storage Ring at GSI in Germany.

This achievement lays the nuclear physics foundation for the LOREX project, which aims to unlock insights into the Sun’s evolutionary history and its connection to Earth’s climate over millennia.

Dr Ragandeep Singh Sidhu, a key contributor to the study and the first author of the publication, highlighted its significance:

This experiment highlights how a single, albeit challenging, measurement can play a pivotal role in addressing significant scientific questions related to solar neutrinos.

The publication is dedicated to the memory of late colleagues Fritz Bosch, Roberto Gallino, Hans Geissel, Paul Kienle, Fritz Nolden, and Gerald J. Wasserburg, whose contributions were integral to the success of this project.

Congratulations to students who received medals, certificates, prizes and scholarships at the School’s Undergraduate and MSc Student Awards Ceremony.

Head of School Professor Philip Best and former Head of School Professor Jim Dunlop announced the awards in recognition of excellent performance and achievement from undergraduate and MSc students during the past two academic years.

Certificates & Medals

207 pre-honours students (years 1 & 2) received Certificates of Merit for outstanding marks in their pre-honours courses. Class Medals are awarded to individuals who received the highest overall mark for their degree programme, with 42 undergraduate and 8 MSc students in receipt of Class Medals.

Prizes and Scholarships

The School has a number of Prizes and Scholarships to award, including a prize for the best final year honours Astrophysics student and a prize for the fourth year student who attains the top mark across all programmes.  29 Prizes and Scholarships were awarded in total to the undergraduate students who achieved outstanding results in their subject area or year. 

Many congratulations to all recipients.

Galaxy mapping data also test how gravity behaves at cosmic scales.

Mapping galaxies

Scientists, including astrophysicists from the University of Edinburgh, used the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to map how nearly six million galaxies cluster across up to 11 billion years of time.

Their complex analysis of DESI’s first year of data provides one of the most stringent tests yet of Einstein’s famous theory of General Relativity and how gravity behaves at cosmic scales.

Looking at galaxies and how they cluster throughout time reveals how the universe’s structure has grown. This allowed DESI’s scientists to test theories of modified gravity – an alternative explanation for our universe’s accelerating expansion typically attributed to dark energy.

They found that the way galaxies cluster is consistent with our standard model of gravity and the predictions made by Einstein.

The result validates the leading model of the universe and limits possible theories of modified gravity, which have been proposed as alternative ways to explain unexpected observations such as the expansion of the universe.

Dr Samuel Brieden, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Observational Cosmology, Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, said:

The tests used a technique to hide the results from the scientists until the analysis pipeline was frozen, mitigating any unconscious bias. Seeing the final, ‘unblinded’ results was exhilarating. It felt like years of research culminating into that single moment.

Neutrino influence

A further insight DESI has revealed is on the mystery of neutrino mass. Neutrinos are elementary particles with very small masses, but the force of gravity they collectively produce affects how galaxies move and cluster in space. The DESI dataset has made it possible to detect the effect of neutrinos, which is exciting for both cosmologists and particle physicists.

About DESI

DESI can capture light from 5,000 galaxies simultaneously. It sits atop the US National Science Foundation’s Nicholas U Mayall 4-metre Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, in Arizona, USA.

DESI is managed by the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). UK involvement in DESI includes Durham University, University College London and the University of Portsmouth as full member institutions, together with individual researchers at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Sussex and Warwick. 

The experiment is now in its fourth of five years surveying the sky and plans to collect data on roughly 40 million galaxies and quasars by the time the project ends.

Edinburgh involvement

While mostly members of the research group led by Professor Florian Beutler (including Dr Samuel Brieden, Dr Richard Neveux, and Dr Mike Shengbo Wang) actively contributed to the study released today, also the groups led by Dr Yan-Chuan Cai, Professor Sergei Koposov, Professor John Peacock, and Professor Alkistis Pourtsidou are deeply involved in the DESI collaboration in various aspects, from investigating the structure of the Milky Way up to testing cosmological models on the largest scales.

Award funds will support Dr Wood’s business ventures in utilising scientific advancements to address societal challenges.

Dr Wood is passionate about using the physics of complex fluids to develop new innovations that will help people live more sustainably and in better health. She has received an Innovate UK Women in Innovation award which will further support her business ventures.

Biotech business

She is the co-founder of biotech business Dyneval which works to improve the profitability and sustainability of farming. In 2022, Dyneval launched the Dynescan, the first semen analyser able to measure the lifetime of semen in conditions similar to the reproductive tract. Tiffany and her co-founder, Dr Vincent Martinez developed this technology from the soft matter physics labs at the University of Edinburgh through to market, and it is bringing exciting new data insights to fertilisation capacity through its automated, precise and reproducible measurements.

Innovative technology

Dr Wood is the inventor of DAINTech, an innovative new gel phase formulation chassis technology that offers long-term stability and unique and beneficial flow characteristics without the use of synthetic polymers. It offers an alternative potential solution to formulate otherwise challenging ingredients and is expected to be broadly applicable to a wide range of industry applications.

Complex fluids

She is also the co-founder and former Director of the Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership (ECFP), which specialises in understanding the interactions between components in soft materials and complex fluids and how they influence product behaviour. Through this understanding, the group helps companies optimise product performance, solve manufacturing challenges, and switch to more sustainable resources and efficient processes. 

Women in Innovation award

The Innovate UK Women in Innovation award was launched in 2016 to encourage more women to apply to Innovate UK funding opportunities. The programme supports women across the UK to fully realise their vision for their businesses and make a real difference to the world through innovation.

Dr Wood accepted her award plaque from the Innovate UK Business Connect team on the 7 November and afterwards gave an inspiring seminar for students and staff titled 'The power of physics: improving efficiencies and sustainability for a better future'.

Team successfully measure the bound-state beta decay of fully-ionized thallium-205 ions.

How long did it take for our Sun to form within its stellar nursery? An international team of scientists has come closer to finding out.

Radioactive nuclei with lifetimes on the order of millions of years can reveal the formation history of the Sun and active nucleosynthesis occurring at the time and place of its birth. Among such nuclei whose decay signatures are found in the oldest meteorites, lead-205 is a powerful example. However, making accurate abundance predictions for lead-205 has so far been impossible because the weak decay rates are very uncertain at stellar temperatures.

To constrain these decay rates, a team of scientists measured the bound-state beta decay of fully ionized thallium-205 ions, an exotic decay mode that only occurs in highly charged ions. Work took place at the Experimental Storage Ring at the GSI/FAIR facility in Germany.

With new, experimentally backed decay rates, they used stellar models to calculate lead-205 yields. They found positive isolation times that are consistent with the other short-lived radioactive nuclei found in the early Solar System.

The results reaffirm the site of the Sun’s birth as a long-lived, giant molecular cloud and support the use of the lead-205–thallium-205 decay system as a chronometer in the early Solar System.

Dr Ragandeep Singh Sidhu, the study’s second author, who is based in the School’s Nuclear Physics research group said:

This significant result enhances our understanding of how radioactive lead-205 is produced in asymptotic giant branch stars and sheds light on the timescale of the Sun’s formation.

The results have been published in Nature.

Prize funds will be used to carry out research in topological problems in soft matter physics.

The Philip Leverhulme Prize is awarded to researchers at an early stage of their career, whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising.

Dr Michieletto’s background is in polymer and statistical physics and he has a track record in using both simulations and experiments. His current main line of research is inspired by how the genome in our cells is mechanically and topologically manipulated by proteins, and he is focused on discovering new DNA-based soft materials and complex fluids that can change topology in time.

Dr Michieletto will use funds from the Philip Leverhulme Prize to continue his group’s research on the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to classify knots. Although mostly focused on understanding the mechanisms through which AI learns mathematical ‘topological invariants’, this research can also have applications to protein folding, genome organisation and even drug design.