New research opportunity seeks to encourage greater diversity within the School community.
Fellowship opportunity
The Elizabeth Gardner Fellowship supports early-career, postdoctoral researchers in physics and astronomy to prepare themselves for future independent roles in academia and beyond.
The Fellowship is aimed at candidates from backgrounds which are under-represented in the School’s academic community (e.g. gender, minority ethnicity, disability, disadvantaged circumstances, etc.).
Supported by a mentor, the Fellowship aims to provide a collegial environment for researchers to develop their research and submit proposals to secure external research funding (e.g. a 5-year Research Fellowship, such as a Royal Society University Research Fellowship; an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship; or an European Research Council fellowship) and, where appropriate, other external research resources such as telescope/facility time.
The deadline for applications is 17:00, Monday 28 February 2022 (extended from 14 February).
Elizabeth Gardner
The Elizabeth Gardner Fellowship honours the outstanding achievements of Elizabeth Gardner (1957 - 1988). Gardner studied Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with first class honours, and was awarded the Tait Medal, Robert Schlapp Prize, and the Class Medal. After studying for a DPhil at the University of Oxford, she later returned to the School of Physics and Astronomy in 1984 as a Research Fellow. Her works on the optimal storage of neural networks have been selected as two of the most influential papers in the 50th anniversary of Journal of Physics A.
Head of School, Professor Jim Dunlop commented:
The Elizabeth Gardner Fellowship reflects the commitment of the School towards making our community a supportive, inclusive and rewarding place for all colleagues to work, and our passion for supporting the career development of a diverse range of early career researchers.
Professor Martin Evans, Director of Research, who was a PhD student under Elizabeth Gardner said:
Elizabeth was a brilliant young scientist whose work is still currency today: the 'Gardner Volume' remains a cornerstone of the theory of neural networks and the 'Gardner transition', predicted by Elizabeth in 1985, has recently been confirmed in diverse contexts ranging from jamming of amorphous materials to theoretical ecology. As an early career researcher in Edinburgh, Elizabeth was a thoughtful and caring supervisor, and this fellowship is a fitting tribute to her memory.
Professor Annette Zippelius, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, former collaborator with Elizabeth Gardner commented:
I deeply admire Elizabeth’s work on spin glasses and neural networks. Her computation of the capacity of the perceptron is ground-breaking work for generations to come. It combines sophisticated techniques with a clear view on the relevant physics, a masterpiece so to say. Her work is an outstanding example of a powerful analytical calculation in a field where these are rare. I think it is a great idea to set up a Gardner fellowship in Edinburgh. Elizabeth is definitely a role model for young women in physics and a fellowship in her name will be a powerful tool to promote young women in science.
Sir David Wallace, former Head of Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh:
Elizabeth was an interesting person. On the face of it, when you met her, she was quite shy, quite retiring, very self-effacing, until she started talking about physics and mathematical physics and then she just opened up as a person. She was such a curious and interested person, and Elizabeth had wider curiosity than just fundamental physics, anything that was challenging, really. Her science was strong as is attested by the impact her work has made later, after her death, and the significant legacy she has left.
Professor Giorgio Parisi, Nobel laureate 2021 said:
I regret that I never had the intellectual pleasure to work with Elizabeth. She was a great scientist and she has given fundamental contributions to the development of statistical mechanics. I have spent my last ten years working on problems related to the Gardner transition in glasses and in other systems. The Elizabeth Gardner Fellowship is a great idea that I strongly support: we must remember our best scientists.
Professor Bernard Derrida, Collège de France, former collaborator commented:
I certainly very much support the idea of this fellowship in the name of Elizabeth. Working with Elizabeth was both pleasant and very stimulating, she was quick to understand and to push very difficult calculations. She was shy but very friendly and I feel that I was very lucky to collaborate with her and I learnt so much during our collaborations. More than 30 years after her death, we can clearly measure the impact of her work, and given that she did all that before she was 30, one can only imagine what her influence on theoretical physics could have been if she had lived longer. Despite her illness, she made wonderful contributions during the last two years of her life, without complaining or even mentioning her health problems.
Professor Catherine Heymans has been awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s (RAS) Herschel medal for her ground-breaking analysis of the evolution of large-scale structures in the Universe using weak gravitational lensing.
Unravelling the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter
Professor Catherine Heymans is an observational cosmologist, internationally recognised as a key founder of the use of weak gravitational lensing as a cosmological tool. This medal is in recognition of her recent work (see link below) leading an international team of researchers in their detailed analysis that combined spectroscopy with optical and near infra-red imaging from the Kilo Degree Survey. Analysing over 30 million galaxies, the team presented state-of-the-art estimates of the fundamental cosmological parameters for the Universe. They found lower values for the clustering of matter today compared to those deduced from observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Together with independent measurements of the Hubble parameter, these ground-breaking results could indicate that our theories of the Dark Universe are missing a fundamental ingredient.
Professor Catherine Heymans’ research seeks to shed light on the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter – elusive entities that together account for more than 95 per cent of the Universe. In 2021 she was awarded the prestigious title of Astronomer Royal for Scotland, and is using this recognition to further share her passion for astronomy with Scots from all walks of life. As well as being a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh, she is also the Director of the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing at the Ruhr-University Bochum.
Herschel Medal
The Herschel Medal is awarded for investigations of outstanding merit in observational astrophysics. It is named after Sir William Herschel, the first president of the Royal Astronomical Society. He made significant contributions to the field, including the discovery of Uranus and the first theories for how stars evolved. Previous recipients of the medal include Noble laureates Arno Penzias, Robert Woodrow Wilson and Renhard Genzel, along with the Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy in Edinburgh, Jim Dunlop. This is only the second time in its almost 50 year history that the medal has been awarded to a female astronomer, following the 1989 award to Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell for her discovery of pulsars.
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The School has announced the 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 Student Awards Ceremony.
Head of School, Prof Jim Dunlop announced the awards in recognition of excellent performance and achievements from undergraduate and MSc students during the last academic year.
Award winner Aitor Mairena Díaz, who recently completed his MSc in Mathematical Physics, gave a talk outlining his academic journey during the pandemic and shared the highlights of his degree.
Year 2 student and award winner Ioanna Moirasgenti thanked staff and peers for their academic and pastoral support which help her make the most of living and studying in Edinburgh.
Certificates & Medals
144 pre-honours students received Certificates of Merit for their achievement in Physics and Mathematical Physics courses. A total of 31 Class Medals were awarded to the students with the highest overall mark for their degree programme.
5 Class Medals were also awarded to MSc students.
Prizes and Scholarships
45 Prizes and Scholarships were awarded to undergraduate students who achieved the highest results in their subject area.
Many congratulations to all recipients.
Astronomers are closer to revealing the dark matter enveloping our Milky Way galaxy, thanks to a new map of twelve streams of stars orbiting within our Galactic halo.
Understanding these star streams is very important for astronomers. As well as revealing the dark matter that holds the stars in their orbits, they also tell us about the formation history of the Milky Way, revealing that the Milky Way has steadily grown over billions of years by shredding and consuming smaller stellar systems.
An international team of collaborators, which includes Dr Sergey Koposov, reader in observational astronomy in the School of Physics and Astronomy, initiated a dedicated program - the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5) - to measure the properties of stellar streams: the shredded remains of neighbouring small galaxies and star clusters that are being torn apart by our own Milky Way.
The team, led by Prof Ting Li from the University of Toronto, are the first group of scientists to study such a rich collection of stellar streams, measuring the speeds of stars using the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT), a 4-meter optical telescope in Australia. They used the Doppler shift of light, used by the police radar guns to capture speeding drivers, to find out how fast individual stars are moving.
Observations from the European Gaia space mission were also used. These enabled astronomers to efficiently identify individual stars belonging to streams among much more populous stellar populations of the Milky Way.
The properties of stellar streams reveal the presence of the invisible dark matter of the Milky Way. Such observations are essential for determining how our Milky Way arose from the featureless universe after the Big Bang.
The latest results have been accepted for publication in the American Astronomical Society’s Astrophysical Journal.
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Congratulations to Dr Carlo Bruno and Dr Fergus Cullen who have received European Research Council starting grants.
The European Research Council (ERC) has announced recipients of its Starting Grants under the Research and Innovation programme, Horizon Europe. Grants worth on average €1.5 million will help ambitious researchers launch their own projects, form their teams of postdoctoral researchers and PhD students, and pursue their research ideas.
Dr Carlo Bruno
Carlo's research focuses on measuring nuclear reactions of key importance to understand the origin of the elements from the Big Bang to supernovae. This involves collaboration with colleagues at the international accelerator facility FAIR based in Germany and the largest European underground accelerator in Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy.
Dr Fergus Cullen
Fergus' research is focussed on the chemical evolution of galaxies across cosmic time, tracing the formation and build up of chemical elements from the Big Bang until the present day. These studies will help us to gain insight into how galaxies formed and evolved over the 13.8 billion years of the Universe's history, and enable us to understand how the Universe became enriched with the elements necessary for life to evolve. Fergus' research will be conducted using state-of-the-art ground-based and space-based telescopes, including the recently-launched James Webb Space Telescope which will become operational in mid-2022.
Funding supports collaboration between Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership and Corning Incorporated.
The Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership (ECFP) has recently received significant funding to continue working with Corning Incorporated: a world-leading innovator in materials science, with expertise in glass and ceramics manufacture.
ECFP are the knowledge exchange centre for the Soft Matter and Biological Physics Group in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and work with industries across multiple sectors to help them improve and innovate in product formulation and processing.
This three-year project, led by Dr Daniel Hodgson and Professor Wilson Poon, will provide Corning with new scientific understanding for the development of technologies and production optimisation in automotive catalyst support and diesel particulate applications. With a global push towards net-zero and a UK government ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars beyond 2030, there is still a significant need for improved emissions control over the next decade and beyond. The impact of poor air quality is a substantial global problem, with millions of deaths associated with elevated concentrations of fine particulate matter, including 98 deaths per 100,000 in the UK.
This work builds on several years of collaboration between Corning and ECFP, which has been supported through a mixture of company funding and an EPSRC Impact Acceleration Partnership Award.
Congratulations to Dr Liu who has been awarded the 2021 Institute of Physics Mary Somerville Medal and Prize.
Dark matter and remote controlled robots
Dr XinRan Liu is a particle physicist specialising in the direct detection of dark matter. XinRan developed a project called Remote3 which aims to deliver STEM outreach to school children in some of the most remote areas of Scotland. As part of this project, pupils are helped to build and program miniature Mars rovers that they can then remotely operate in the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Mars Yard located at the Boulby Underground Laboratory 1.1 km underground, in which XinRan carries out much of his research.
XinRan is currently the chair of the Dark Matter UK public engagement committee, co-chair of the Institute of Physics Astroparticle Physics outreach committee and has been elected as the LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Experiment outreach coordinator in the UK. As such he is instrumental in coordinating the UK public engagement effort for Dark Matter physics.
2021 success stories
The Mary Somerville Medal and Prize follows in the footsteps of other recognitions XinRan has received this year. XinRan received an STFC Leadership Fellowship in Public Engagement to expand the scope and reach of his Remote3 project across Scotland; and he received recognition for his public engagement activities by becoming a British Science Association Award Lecture winner.
Institute of Physics
The Institute of Physics (IOP) is the professional body and learned society for physics, and the leading body for practising physicists, in the UK and Ireland. The IOP awards celebrate physicists at every stage of their career; from those just starting out through to physicists at the peak of their careers, and those with a distinguished career behind them. Its annual awards reflect the wide variety of people, places, organisations and achievements that make physics such an exciting discipline.
About Mary Somerville
Mary Somerville was a Scottish science writer and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy. She and Caroline Herschel were jointly nominated as the first women members of the Royal Astronomical Society. She is featured on the front of the Royal Bank of Scotland polymer £10 note launched in 2017, alongside a quote from her work 'The Connection of the Physical Sciences', which is one of the biggest-selling science books of the 19th century and was commonly used as a textbook until the early 20th century.
Award recognises contributions to communication, engagement and in advancing public discussion in science.
Alex has a long-standing and sustained track record of outstanding contributions to science’s public engagement, particularly in particle physics, and in dark matter - one of the most common yet most mysterious and hard-to-study substances in the field of physics.
Through his public engagement activities, he has reached diverse audiences in Scotland, the UK, and internationally. Alex has spearheaded innovative public engagement initiatives, including the Remote3 project, which delivers STEM outreach to some of the most remote areas of Scotland by helping pupils build and programme miniature Mars rovers that they can then remotely operate in an underground laboratory.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) medals recognise individuals who are exemplary at communicating, facilitating engagement, and advancing public discussion on significant matters.
Alex became elected as a Fellow of the RSE in early 2021. There are around 1,600 RSE Fellows who are leading thinkers and practitioners from Scotland and beyond, whose work has a significant impact on our nation.
Mars explorers searching for signs of ancient life could be fooled by fossil-like specimens created by chemical processes, research suggests.
Rocks on Mars may contain numerous types of non-biological deposits that look similar to the kinds of fossils likely to be found if the planet ever supported life, a study says. Telling these false fossils apart from what could be evidence of ancient life on the surface of Mars – which was temporarily habitable four billion years ago – is key to the success of current and future missions, researchers say.
Astrobiologists from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford reviewed evidence of all known processes that could have created lifelike deposits in rocks on Mars. They identified dozens of processes – with many more likely still undiscovered – that can produce structures that mimic those of microscopic, simple lifeforms that may once have existed on Mars.
Among the lifelike specimens these processes can create are deposits that look like bacterial cells and carbon-based molecules that closely resemble the building blocks of all known life. Because signs of life can be so closely mimicked by non-living processes, the origins of any fossil-like specimens found on Mars are likely to be very ambiguous, the team says. They call for greater interdisciplinary research to shed more light on how lifelike deposits could form on Mars, and thereby aid the search for evidence of ancient life there and elsewhere in the solar system.
The research is published in the Journal of the Geological Society.
Dr Sean McMahon, Chancellor’s Fellow in Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy, said:
At some stage a Mars rover will almost certainly find something that looks a lot like a fossil, so being able to confidently distinguish these from structures and substances made by chemical reactions is vital. For every type of fossil out there, there is at least one non-biological process that creates very similar things, so there is a real need to improve our understanding of how these form.
Julie Cosmidis, Associate Professor of Geobiology at the University of Oxford, said:
We have been fooled by life-mimicking processes in the past. On many occasions, objects that looked like fossil microbes were described in ancient rocks on Earth and even in meteorites from Mars, but after deeper examination they turned out to have non-biological origins. This article is a cautionary tale in which we call for further research on life-mimicking processes in the context of Mars, so that we avoid falling into the same traps over and over again.
Experiments demonstrate a high reactivity between carbon and hydrogen at conditions comparable with those in the Earth’s upper mantle.
Turning diamond – the finest gem – into methane – one of the worst greenhouse gases, more than 25 times potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere – may not sound a brilliant idea. However, an international collaboration between scientists from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bologna, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), HPSTAR (China) and the Institute of Solid State Physics (Chinese Academy of Sciences) discovered that diamond and hydrogen can react yielding to methane, in what may play a key role in cycling carbon in the deep Earth.
The researchers observed that methane was produced by diamond-hydrogen interactions in seconds at conditions of pressure and temperature analogous to those at 70 km deep. Although the possibility for diamond to form from methane in the Earth’s mantle was known, the opposite reaction was not included in the inventory of processes regulating the deep carbon cycle.
Dr Peña-Alvarez from the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions commented on the experiment:
To experimentally reproduce deep Earth conditions, we used an experimental apparatus called a diamond-anvil cell, where the flat surfaces of two diamonds are pushed against each other. We noticed that when the cell is loaded with pure hydrogen and heated, the diamonds readily react to form methane and longer-chain hydrocarbons.
Professor Vitale Brovarone from the University of Bologna and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, reported:
This discovery provides a new tile of the deep carbon cycle, which accounts for about 90% of the total carbon on Earth. The genesis of methane from diamond and hydrogen also demonstrates that hydrocarbons unrelated to biological activities can form in deep Earth and may act as source of energy for shallower geological reservoirs.
The collaboration includes former School of Physics and Astronomy PhD students Dr Philip Dalladay-Simpson, who is currently based at HPSTAR, China and Dr Mary-Ellen Donnelly who is currently based at Oak Ridge Spallation Source, United States of America.
