School of Physics and Astronomy

The School welcomes applications from both external and internal scientists interested in applying for personal fellowships.

We are keen to attract outstanding researchers from Edinburgh and across the world to join us as Postdoctoral Fellows.  We offer a high quality research environment and support for you in your fellowship application process. 

Fellowship opportunities

The School operates an internal review process for the following fellowship opportunities:

• UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships
• Royal Society University Research Fellowships
• STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowships
• EPSRC Fellowships
• Royal Astronomical Society Fellowships
• Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship
• Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship

Application information

Candidates are expected to have a PhD in Physics, Astronomy or a related discipline, and in most cases a few years research experience, as well as the ability to present clear evidence of their potential to undertake leading research.

The School of Physics and Astronomy is committed to advancing equality and diversity, welcoming applications from everyone irrespective of gender, ethnic group or nationality. We particularly encourage applications from female and/or BAME candidates.

How to apply

Candidates must submit information including a research statement, CV and list of publications.  The deadline for a number of these fellowships is noon, 17 July 2020.

Astronomers have seen what could be the first ever light flare detected from a black hole merger.

Their findings potentially create a new chapter within astrophysics because the merger of black holes was not expected to generate light waves, as the gravity associated with black holes is so great that nothing – not even light – usually escapes from them.

The study – published in Physical Review Letters – involved an international team of scientists, including physicists from the School of Physics and Astronomy.

Gravitational waves

Previous observations have shown that when two black holes spiral around each other and ultimately collide and merge, they generate ripples in space and time known as gravitational waves.

The phenomena is a direct consequence of Einstein’s theory of gravity and was first detected by scientists in 2015, leading to the Nobel Prize in Physics. 

Black hole merger

In the latest study, a black hole merger was spotted by the National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Virgo detector in May 2019. As the black holes collided with each other, they sent out the expected gravitational waves.

Shortly after, the California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech) Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), located at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, captured a flare of light that was pinpointed to the same area as the gravitational wave event.

This supermassive black hole was burbling along for years before this more abrupt flare. The flare occurred on the right timescale, and in the right location, to be coincident with the gravitational-wave event. In our study, we conclude that the flare is likely the result of a black hole merger, but we cannot completely rule out other possibilities.

Matthew Graham - Lead author, Research Professor of Astronomy, Caltech 

Light flare

Supermassive black holes lurk at the centre of most galaxies, including our own, the Milky Way. These central supermassive black holes can be surrounded by a disc of flowing gas which contains swarms of stars and smaller black holes.

The flow of the gas helps to bring the smaller black holes together, enabling them to merge, and creates a larger black hole within the disk. Upon creation, the new black hole has a large velocity and it is given what scientists described as “a kick” through the gas disk.

Experts said it is the reaction of the gas to the new speeding black hole that creates a bright light flare, visible with telescopes.

The newly formed larger black hole should cause another burst of light in the next few years, according to the scientists.

This result, the optical flash resulting from two black holes colliding and crushing the gas around them, is so exciting. As a wee kid, I was hooked by the idea of black holes and now, as a big kid, the fact that we have ‘seen’ as well as ‘heard’ these black hole mergers, is an amazing discovery that has deep implications for astrophysics. I'd like to thank the LIGO, Virgo and ZTF collaborations for their dedication and hard work over the years and I hope this finding inspires people of all ages and informs future studies in astronomy.

Dr Nicholas Ross - Project collaborator and STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh.

The paper, titled, "A Candidate Electromagnetic Counterpart to the Binary Black Hole Merger Gravitational Wave Event GW190521g” was funded by the NSF, NASA, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) programme.

The School is committed to addressing equality, diversity and inclusion, and has a zero-tolerance stance to any form of racist or discriminatory behaviour.

As Head of School, I want to share with you the following message that has been written in collaboration with members of the School’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Committee.

Race relations worldwide have been brought into sharp focus by the recent brutal killing of George Floyd in the USA.  The harmful and toxic effects of discrimination are obviously not unique to the USA; at this time many of us will be reflecting on experiences of racism closer to home - be that personal experiences or those of our friends, family and loved ones, as well as those of colleagues, students, and others in our community. The events of recent days will also have generated feelings of anger, distress, or anxiety amongst us.

The University has recorded its outrage at the killing of George Floyd and has recognised in its published statement our collective responsibility to address systemic racism and to treat each other with dignity, compassion and respect.

My message is one of compassion for anyone who has been a target of racism and those that are affected by the current protests. I stand firmly behind our School’s commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion, and a zero-tolerance stance to any form of racist or discriminatory behaviour.  The School of Physics & Astronomy embraces the power that diversity brings. Our Juno / Athena SWAN plan includes institutional support for a network for staff who identify as BAME, and last summer the School employed a summer intern to co-develop the School's EDI website, including links to resources on race. However, it is clear there is much more to be achieved in improving the representation and experiences of Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff and students in our School.

In recent months, the senior management team of the College of Science & Engineering has been discussing these issues. All members of this team, including all Heads of Schools, have committed to take part in bespoke Race Equality training, including addressing white privilege and recruitment/promotion. We have also committed to have open conversations about race, racism and science, and the College has agreed to fund Diversity Challenge, a live event that highlights the under-representation of certain groups in academia.

Over the summer, the School is employing student interns to look at the visible representation of scientists in JCMB and to look at aspects of decolonising the physics and astronomy we teach.

Before the lockdown, the School's EDI Committee had been looking at ways to better address the issues faced by BAME staff & students, and other protected groups. If you wish to be part of our School’s ongoing efforts to address these challenges, please contribute to the work of our EDI Committee (including, if appropriate, suggesting additional resources for the School's EDI website). In the first instance, please get in touch with the Director of EDI, victoria.martin [at] ed.ac.uk (Prof Victoria Martin).

I am a member of the EDI Committee and we are here to support any member of the School community affected by racism or by the recent events in the USA and the UK. If you would like to talk to anyone in confidence, please again contact our victoria.martin [at] ed.ac.uk (Director of EDI).

Best wishes, and stay safe.

Prof Jim Dunlop

New precision measurements of the lineshape of the χc1(3872) are helping scientists to understand the nature of this puzzling meson.

Studies of hadron states allow us to understand the properties of the strong nuclear force that binds quarks together. Since its discovery in 2003 by the Belle collaboration there has been much speculation about the nature of the χ_c1(3872) state. Its properties are not consistent with it being a conventional charmonium state composed of a charm-anticharm pair. This has led to speculation that it is more exotic in nature, e.g. that is a four-quark state (tetraquark) or a bound DD* molecular state. Following the discovery of the χ_c1(3872) state there has been a resurgence in exotic spectroscopy and many new particles (the ‘XYZ’ states) have been reported.

The LHCb (Large Hardron Collider beauty experiment) collaboration has just released the results of two analyses that make precision studies of the χ_c1(3872)  lineshape using its decay to the J/ψπ⁺π⁻ final state. Two models were used to study the χ_c1(3872) lineshape (Breit−Wigner and Flatté). For the first time a non-zero value of the natural width of this state is found. In addition, the precision on the measurement of the mass is improved by more than a factor of two. The difference of the χ_c1(3872) mass to the sum of the D and D* meson masses is found to be only 70±120 keV. The lineshape measurements hint towards the conclusion that the χ_c1(3872) has both charm-anticharm and molecular.

Dr Matthew Needham, Reader at the University of Edinburgh, who led one of the two studies commented:

These studies are really groundbreaking in terms of the achieved precision. The puzzle of the nature the χ_c1(3872) remains but these results will help us to piece together the puzzle. We are continuing to work on this subject and more results are expected in the future.

In particular it is planned to build on the Flatté fit model to make the first coupled channel analysis of the χ_c1(3872) lineshape in the J/ψπ⁺π⁻ and DD* decay modes. In addition, the LHCb detector is currently being upgraded allowing an order of magnitude more data to be collected when the LHC restarts running in 2021.

Discovery that helium and ammonia can form compounds over a wide pressure range.

Helium and ammonia are both found in large quantities inside icy giant planets. Because helium is generally considered to be the most inert element in the periodic table, it is not clear whether these two components can react with each other under planetary conditions of extreme pressures and temperatures, or what kinds of states might emerge.

Using crystal structure search techniques and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations, an international team including Dr Andreas Hermann from the Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions found that helium-ammonia compounds can form over a wide pressure range. 

Upon heating, these compounds are predicted to form plastic phases (with spinning molecules on periodic lattices) and superionic states (which are part liquid, part solid). The study published in Physical Review X and featured in American Physical Society review Physics, provides new and surprising insights into the properties of compounds that may exist in icy giant planets and into new chemistry and physics of helium compounds under extreme conditions.

Congratulations to Dr James Aird and Dr Maxwell T. Hansen who have been awarded UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowships.

The UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships have been instigated to ensure the strong supply of talented individuals needed for a vibrant environment for research and innovation in the UK.  In this third round of the Fellowships, we are pleased that two successful candidates have chosen the School of Physics and Astronomy as their new home.

Galaxy evolution, and challenging the Standard Model

Dr James Aird will be joining the Institute for Astronomy.  He will use his Future Leaders Fellowship to probe the lifecycles of supermassive black holes on timescales of millions to billions of years, and thus determine their impact on the growth and evolution of the galaxies they lie in. To achieve this, he will develop new statistical tools to combine data from a range of new, large astronomical surveys spanning X-ray, optical and radio wavelengths.

Dr Max Hansen, who will be joining the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, is a theorist seeking evidence for phenomena that go beyond the current paradigm of particle physics, the Standard Model. Specifically, he is focused on understanding the role of the strong force in uncovering new physics signatures. He will use his Future Leaders Fellowship to combine cutting-edge high-performance computing with an advanced theoretical framework to inform experiments challenging the Standard Model, such as those being performed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

These Fellowships follow Anna Lisa Varri and Franz Herzog who were successful in the first two rounds of the award.

UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship

The scheme will help the next generation of researchers, tech entrepreneurs, business leaders and innovators across different sectors and disciplines to get the support they need to develop their careers. Awardees will each receive between £400,000 and £1.5 million over an initial four years, supporting novel projects, equipment and personal development.

A supernova which is at least twice as bright and energetic, and likely much more massive than any yet recorded, has been identified by a team of astronomers.

Scientists believe the supernova, dubbed SN2016aps, could be an example of an extremely rare ‘pulsational pair-instability’ supernova, possibly formed from two massive stars that merged before the explosion. The findings are published in Nature Astronomy.

Such an event so far only exists in theory and has never been confirmed through astronomical observations.

The team international team of astronomers who identified the supernova include Dr Matt Nicholl, former Royal Astronomical Society fellow and current long-term visitor at the Institute of Astronomy, the University of Edinburgh, and lecturer at the University of Birmingham, as well as astronomers from Harvard, Northwestern University and Ohio University.

Supernovae can be measured using two scales – the total energy of the explosion, and the amount of that energy that is emitted as observable light, or radiation. In a typical supernova, the radiation is less than 1 per cent of the total energy. However, in SN2016aps, the team found the radiation was five times the explosion energy of a normal-sized supernova. This is the most light ever seen emitted by a supernova.

In order to become this bright, the explosion must have been much more energetic than usual. By examining the light spectrum, the team were able to show that the explosion was powered by a collision between the supernova and a massive shell of gas, shed by the star in the years before it exploded.

The team observed the explosion for two years, until it faded to 1 per cent of its peak brightness. Using these measurements, they calculated the mass of the supernova was between 50 to 100 times greater than our sun (solar masses). Typically supernovae have masses of between 8 and 15 solar masses.

Supernova 2016aps was first detected in data from the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), a large-scale astronomical survey programme. The team also used data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Keck and Gemini Observatories, in Hawaii, and the MDM and MMT Observatories in Arizona. Other collaborating institutions included Stockholm University, Copenhagen University, California Institute of Technology, and Space Telescope Science Institute.

The research was funded through a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellowship, along with grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Horizon 2020 European Union.

Computer simulations of molecular probes binding weakly to target DNA suggests a new way to help detect diseases.

The current coronavirus crisis highlights the need for fast and accurate detection of infectious diseases. Both viral infections like coronavirus and bacterial infections like those associated with antimicrobial resistance (AMR) can be detected by screening for DNA in patient samples. However this is challenging because the amount of disease DNA is small and it has to be detected in the presence of other, non-disease DNA. Typically, scientists undertake this screening by designing molecular probes that bind strongly to the disease DNA but not to the non-disease DNA.

A new study, which is about to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, uses computer simulations to suggest how this could be done better. The idea is that instead of designing molecular probes that bind strongly to one place on the target DNA, scientists should, counterintuitively, design probes that bind weakly all over the target DNA.

Experiments are required to test how well this works in practice – but it is exciting work, given the urgent need for fast, reliable disease detection methods, especially those that can be applied in countries with a weak health infrastructure.

This work was conducted by Prof Rosalind Allen at the University of Edinburgh, jointly with a multinational team of researchers in Cambridge, China, London and Slovenia. 

Scientists have used a new technique to take the first-ever measurement of atmospheric wind speed outside the solar system.

A team of Astronomers, including the Institute for Astronomy’s Dr Beth Biller, have used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to take the first measurement of wind speed on a brown dwarf - an object intermediate in mass between a planet and a star.

Method of measurement

The method the team used is similar to that used to measure winds on Earth. To explain: imagine a cloud being blown by some wind.  If you are looking down at Earth from space, you could measure the speed of a continent as it rotates in and out of view and a different speed for the cloud as it rotates in out of view.  The difference in speed occurs because wind has pushed that cloud relative to the surface.

For planets and brown dwarfs outside of our solar system, we cannot see the clouds themselves, but when a cloud rotates into view or out of view, it changes the brightness of the planet. With that in mind, the team monitored the brightness of brown dwarf 2MASS J1047+21 and used periodic changes in its brightness to determine the rate at which the atmosphere was rotating.

Radio data

As continents on objects outside of our solar system​ cannot be observed, the team relied on observations at radio wavelengths to look at the rotation of a planet’s magnetic field below the atmosphere.

Since the magnetic field originates deep in the planet, or in this case brown dwarf, the radio data allowed the team to determine the interior period of rotation. Once they had an interior rotation rate and an atmospheric rotation rate, they could compare them to see how fast the wind was blowing.

The researchers measured a wind speed of 650 meters per second (1,450 miles per hour) for the brown dwarf they studied, which is 33.2 light years from earth.

Team collaboration

The team of collaborators, lead by Bucknell University‘s Professor ​Katelyn Allers​ also includes Dr Johanna Vos, from the American Museum of Natural History and Peter K. G. Williams, from the Center for Astrophysics and the American Astronomical Society.

Dr Beth Biller commented:

Pioneering this new technique is quite exciting, as it will enable future researchers to better understand the physics of atmospheres outside of our solar system.

University of Edinburgh colleagues who are working on the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) experiment at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) have discovered a system of three particles interpreted as three new excited Xic0 states. The Xic0 state is a baryon composed of a charm-, a strange- and a down-quark (csd).

The lightest of all baryons, the proton, which is the nucleus of the hydrogen atom, is composed of two up- and one down-quark (uud) while its neutral partner the neutron is composed of two down- and one up-quark (ddu). If one (or more) light quark is replaced by either a charm c or a beauty b heavy quark we obtain heavier charmed or beauty baryon particles. The three quarks can also be formed in their lowest-energy quantum mechanical state: the ground state. Like electrons in atoms, the quarks can be rearranged into excited states with different values of angular momentum and quark spin orientation.

LHCb physicists searched for excited Xi_c⁰ states in their decay into a Λ_c⁺ baryon and a K^- meson. Three new excited states of the Xi_c⁰ baryon have been observed and are named Ξc(2923)0, Ξc(2939)0 and Ξc(2965)0. The numbers in brackets represent the measured masses of each state.

Emmy Gabriel, PhD student within the Particle Physics Experiment Research Group at Edinburgh who was leading the analysis, said:

It has been incredibly interesting to perform an analysis in the field of baryon spectroscopy, and I am excited to see how the community will respond to this discovery.

The observed system seems to be related to another system of baryons observed a few years ago which drew a lot of attention from the scientific community.

Dr Marco Pappagallo, LHCb research assistant within the Particle Physics Experiment Group reported:

This discovery probes the internal structure of the baryons and helps us to understand how quarks bind together inside the hadrons.

An upgrade of the LHCb experiment is ongoing with the contribution of the Edinburgh group into commissioning the Cherenkov detector, which is essential to identify the different types of particles involved in this discovery. The LHCb experiment plans to collect a much larger dataset in the upcoming years which will allow physicists to study the properties of these new states by measuring their spin and parities.

Prof Franz Muheim, leader of the LHCb team at the University of Edinburgh said:

With this avalanche of discoveries of new baryons with charmed and b-quarks, LHCb has established charmed and beauty baryon spectroscopy as an experimental topic.