School of Physics and Astronomy

We are delighted to announce that the School of Physics & Astronomy has been recognised by the Institute of Physics (IOP) for its actions to address gender inequities across its student and staff body.

In awarding the prestigious Juno Champion status to the School, the IOP highlighted the clear and strong commitment of senior management to equality and diversity in the workplace, and particularly applauded the School’s progress in redressing historical gender imbalances in university physics.

“The Juno process gives us a wonderful opportunity to stand back and look at the changes we've made over the past 10 years, and celebrate the improvements that make the School a great place to work and study." Prof. Cait MacPhee, Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems

"This award reflects the widespread desire within the School to ensure that in our pursuit of excellence we enable all to flourish. I am really pleased by the steps that we have taken and the commitment that everyone has shown to win us this prestigious award.” Prof. Arthur Trew, Head of School

To achieve the new status, we demonstrated progression against a range of Juno principles set up to improve the working culture. This is reflected in, for example, a high degree of overall satisfaction with the workplace, as expressed by staff members at all grades. Moreover, in contrast to national trends, there is no evidence for a “leaky pipeline” of women from the School as they progress from undergraduate through postgraduate to postdoctoral level. The award also celebrates the 5-fold increase in the proportion of female staff, and our increased levels of support for early career researchers, since we began the Juno journey in 2004.

The School of Physics & Astronomy joins a growing list of eight other physics departments named Juno Champions in the UK and Ireland, and is the second such award made to a Scottish Physics department.

The School’s Juno committee comprised Richard Blythe, Toni Collis, Ashley Cooke, Robyn Donnelly, Louise Ferguson, Cait MacPhee, Gill Maddy, Salomé Matos, John Peacock and Kate Slaughter.

Juno Code of Practice and level of engagement

The IOP's Code of Practice was developed in response to a recommendation of the International Perceptions of UK Research in Physics and Astronomy report that a special focus to attract and retain women in physics is needed.

The Code is based on best practice identified from IOP's "Women in University Physics departments: A Site Visit Scheme", which ran from 2003 to 2005. It sets out practical ideas for actions that departments can take to address the underrepresentation of women in university physics and emphasises the need for dialogue, transparency and openness.

There are three levels of engagement with the Code:

• As a Supporter, physics departments endorse the five principles set out in the Code of Practice. 
• Practitioner status requires the department to demonstrate that its Juno journey is well underway and an initial evidence-based action plan demonstrating how the department aims to achieve Champion status is created.
• As a Champion, physics departments are confirmed to have met the five principles set out.

There are now 9 Champion departments, 13 Practitioners and 24 Supporters.

The Institute for Astronomy's Prof. James Dunlop has been awarded the 2014 George Darwin Lectureship by the Royal Astronomical Society. The Lecture is given annually, on a topic in astronomy, cosmology or astroparticle physics.

Prof. Dunlop is Head of the Institute for Astronomy, having previously held this position from 2002-2007. He has also received a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award and currently holds an ERC Advanced Investigator Award.

"I am very honoured and pleased by this award of the George Darwin Lectureship from the RAS, especially given the impressive list of previous recipients. I would like to thank whoever nominated me, and also the awards committee of the RAS for providing me with such a positive start to 2014." Prof. James Dunlop

Award citation

Professor James Dunlop FRSE of the University of Edinburgh has played a leading role in transforming our understanding of how galaxies form. He has pioneered new fields of study and then established them as mature areas of research, often by leading major new observational programmes. The first systematic study of quasar host galaxies was carried out by Professor Dunlop, and he went on to discover that their basic properties are indistinguishable from their inactive counterparts.

He has demonstrated that the most massive radio galaxies and black holes formed before most of their lower mass counterparts, an effect known as 'downsizing'. Through his leadership on age-dating galaxies, he provided the first evidence that massive galaxies formed at redshifts greater than 5. He took sub-mm astronomy from its infancy, through developments in instrumentation with SCUBA, to establish the basic properties of star-forming galaxies shrouded in cosmic dust, and has played key roles in studying the formation of the very first galaxies.

For these reasons, Professor Dunlop is awarded the 2014 George Darwin Lectureship.

The School funds and supports six students with a bursary of £1,500 each to undertake projects within the School during the Summer vacation period.

Placements are open to students in the School of Physics & Astronomy and whose supervisor is a member of the School's staff. Projects should last a maximum of 8 weeks and will be defined and fully supported by members of academic staff. 

Deadline for application

Fully completed applications should be submitted by the project supervisor, and must be received in the Physics & Astronomy Teaching Office no later than 5pm on Friday 14th February 2014. 

Find out more

Student bursaries website.

You can also read about some of our students' experiences on the summer placements webpage.

School PhD student Michal Kepa was awarded the 1st Audience Award and the 2nd Jury Award for his presentation at the Science. Polish Perspectives conference in Cambridge in November. Here is his report of the event.

Science. Polish Perspectives is a popular science conference addressed at young researchers of Polish origin working abroad, mainly in the UK but also in other countries. The aim of the conference is to popularise science and give an opportunity for young Polish researchers to communicate their research and participate in the discussion of Polish contributions to science.

The conference was held in English and gathered 170 guests and participants from 10 different countries. Several different workshops took place during the event, giving participants a chance to master science communication skills or to take part in technology-applied-to-business case studies.

This was the second Science. Polish Perspectives conference and, thanks to the organisers, it was a huge success and also a very enjoyable event. In my opinion, the best part of the conference was a chance to network and also get to know of opportunities for science communication and possible funding from different institutions, both Polish and international.    

Presentation: Listening to Magnetism at Extreme Conditions

Abstract: Imagine that the samples in your laboratory could make sounds to tell you what properties they exhibit. Such an idea does not seem so strange if one applies ultrasound. Ultrasonic probe is mostly known for its application to investigate babies in the mothers’ wombs. However, it can be also used in condensed matter physics to study a variety of electrical and magnetic properties.

In my talk, I explained how ultrasound is used to listen to a sample when it becomes magnetic. I work on the uranium compound UGe2. When exposed to high pressures and very low temperatures, it becomes magnetic and also superconducting, which is a complete loss of electrical resistance. To carry out my project, I designed an apparatus which takes samples to pressures 25000 times greater than the atmospheric one. Magnetism and superconductivity are usually mutually exclusive. Understanding this exotic behaviour is a focus of my research.
 

The distinguished scientist Professor Peter Higgs has been honoured by the Royal Swedish Academy for his work in predicting the Higgs boson particle.

Prof. Higgs came up with a theory for the particle, which is fundamental to the laws of physics, when he was a researcher at the University of Edinburgh in the 1960s. Its existence was confirmed almost 50 years later, in 2012, by the CERN research facility near Geneva. Prof. Higgs shares the 2013 Prize with Prof. Francois Englert of the Free University of Brussels, who independently researched the same theory.

Professor Higgs and other Nobel laureates will be presented with a medal and diploma by the King of Sweden at a formal ceremony at Stockholm Concert Hall. Presentations are followed by a banquet for laureates, their families and other guests at Stockholm City Hall.

“I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Swedish Academy. I would also like to congratulate all those who have contributed to the discovery of this new particle and to thank my family, friends and colleagues for their support.” Prof. Higgs

Building on the Higgs legacy

Higgs Centre for Innovation

The University of Edinburgh is building on the Higgs legacy by developing its expertise in physics. The University has welcomed the recent award of £10.7 million from the UK Treasury to create a Higgs Centre for Innovation. The Centre will be based at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC), at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.

Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics

The University aims to create a new home for the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University’s King’s Buildings campus. The Centre was created in 2012, following confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson particle. Two new MSc programmes in Theoretical Physics and Mathematical Physics were also established as part of the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics.

Free online course

The University will soon begin delivering a free online course giving insight into the work of Professor Higgs. The seven-week course, the Discovery of the Higgs Boson, features interviews with the Professor and filmed lectures by other physicists at Edinburgh. The University is offering the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) via the FutureLearn platform.

Prof. Higgs' Nobel Lecture

Profs Higgs and Englert presented lectures to an audience in Stockholm ahead of the Nobel ceremony. This video shows Prof. Englert's Nobel Lecture, The BEH Mechanism and its Scalar Boson, and Prof. Higgs' Nobel Lecture, Evading the Goldstone Theorem.

The Higgs Centre for Innovation will provide a dedicated forum to link scientific and engineering expertise with industry leaders.

The new facility will build on the legacy of the achievements of Prof. Peter Higgs, who this year was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics for his contribution to the theoretical work which led to the prediction of the Higgs boson particle.

The Centre, which has received capital investment of £10.7million, will create a world-leading facility for inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers through providing start-up business support and opportunities for new partnerships.

It will be based at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC), on the Royal Observatory Edinburgh campus.

Today’s announcement builds on the support already committed by the Scottish Government for a Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics based at the University of Edinburgh, announced in October. Two new MSc programmes in Theoretical Physics and Mathematical Physics were also established as part of the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics.

This investment, along with the pledge of £100,000 from a highly-valued supporter of the University, Prof. Walter Nimmo, will help create a dedicated training environment for new generations of leading physicists.

“This support from the Treasury and the STFC will create an environment in which future generations of scientists from around the world can share and develop ideas in theoretical physics." Prof. Peter Higgs

The Principal of the University of Edinburgh said the support for two world-leading Centres will put the UK on the map as the focal point for training and research in the field of theoretical physics.

"This Centre for Innovation will focus on incubating new companies and on start-up business support. It will house up to 12 small, new companies, as well as providing accommodation for some academic staff and PhD students. Our aim is that these students will be able to obtain a richer experience by rubbing shoulders with industrialists, as well as academic researchers." Prof. Arthur Trew, Head of the School of Physics & Astronomy

ARCHER (Advanced Research Computing High End Resource) is the next national HPC service for academic research.

The service comprises a number of components: accommodation provided by the University of Edinburgh; hardware by Cray; systems support by EPCC and Daresbury Laboratory; and user and computational science and engineering support by EPCC.

In Autumn 2011, the Minister for Science announced a new capital investment in e-infrastructure, which included £43m for ARCHER, the next national HPC facility for academic research. After a brief overlap, ARCHER will take over from HECToR as the UK’s primary Academic research supercomputer. HECToR has been in Edinburgh since 2007.

ARCHER will also be used to provide high performance computing training, including the MSc in High Performance Computing offered by EPCC, to train the next generation of computational professionals. 

You can read more about ARCHER on the EPCC blog.

Europe’s billion-star surveyor will be launched into space on 19 December, when it will embark on its mission to create a highly accurate 3D map of our galaxy.

By repeatedly observing a billion stars with its billion-pixel video camera, the Gaia mission will allow astronomers to determine the origin and evolution of our galaxy whilst also testing gravity, mapping our inner solar system, and uncovering tens of thousands of previously unseen objects, including asteroids in our solar system, planets around nearby stars, and supernovae in other galaxies.

Gaia will map the stars from an orbit around the Sun, near a location some 1.5 million km beyond Earth’s orbit known as the L2 Lagrangian point. The spacecraft will spin slowly, sweeping its two telescopes across the entire sky and focusing their light simultaneously onto a single digital camera, the largest ever flown in space.

Edinburgh and Gaia

"Gaia is an ambitious mission employing a complex instrument orbiting in deep space. Accurate calibration of the instrument is required to make the precise angular measurements that astronomers wish to achieve in order to do the revolutionary science for which Gaia is designed.

"Within our small team of scientists and software engineers at the IfA we are pleased to be contributing calibration software in key areas of the on-ground processing systems for the Gaia data." Nigel Hambly, Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh

UK scientists and engineers played key roles in the design and build of Gaia, including astronomers and software developers in the School's Institute for Astronomy (IfA) who made a significant contribution to the ground data-processing system. The IfA team members are Ross Collins, Nick Cross, Michael Davidson, Nigel Hambly and Alex Ouzounis. Dr Hambly explains the team's involvement.

Gaia's imaging system

"At the heart of Gaia is an imaging system that employs charge-coupled devices (CCDs) consisting of arrays of optical light-sensitive elements. These CCDs are specially designed versions of the same kind of detector commonly found in digital cameras, but they operate in a particular mode and within the harsh environment of deep space. However, this results in anomalies in the measured signals, and the Edinburgh team is tasked with dealing with two specific aspects of this problem, along with associated calibration issues.

"The first problem concerns the way the CCDs “see” the star field being scanned. In a domestic digital camera, we point at the scene of interest and then click the shutter to get an exposure of usually some fraction of a second. The CCD is then very quickly read out to capture an image of the scene as a stream of data numbers that reflect the electronic charge in each pixel produced by incident light from the scene. A clue to the way in which a CCD is read out is in the name: each pixel is “charge-coupled” to its neighbours such that once exposed, the array of charge measurements can be moved across the pixel array and into a line of light-insensitive, but similarly charge-coupled pixels known as the read-out register which is itself clocked to shift charge to produce a sequence of data numbers. Hence the CCD is read by shuffling each line of pixels in turn into this serial register.

"However in Gaia, rather than using the familiar point-and-shoot mode we commonly employ when using a digital camera, the CCD is continually clocked in what is known as time-delay integration (TDI) mode. As the satellite scans the sky, the CCD is continually clocked such that the scene shuffles across the device at a rate that exactly counteracts the scan. So, rather than observing individual pointed frames, a long image strip is imaged by each CCD.

Simulation of Gaia imaging

"A (very) short simulated example of such a strip image can be seen on the European Space Agency's website (picture credit: Dr Michael Davidson, IfA Edinburgh). This simulation shows several interesting features of Gaia imaging.

"For orientation, Gaia is scanning from right to left, while the CCDs are clocked to shuffle charge from left to right in order to compensate for the image motion. Ignoring the vertical stripes for the moment, we can see star images on a flat background with the familiar diffraction spikes introduced by Gaia’s imaging system of mirrors.

"However if we look closely on the left hand (trailing) side of each image, we can see that charge has been smeared away from the centre. This effect is known as charge-transfer inefficiency (CTI) and is the result of radiation damage to the CCD pixels. Incident radiation (primarily solar protons in this case) damages the crystalline structure of the CCD pixels, inducing traps that grab charge from passing signals as they are shuffled along the columns of pixels. This trapped charge is then released a short time later, but after the signal has passed. In this way, the image of each star is distorted a small but significant amount, and this distortion will get worse as the radiation dose received by Gaia increases throughout its mission.

"Note that the bright vertical lines in the images are periodic, artificial “charge injections” that will be employed in the Gaia CCDs to fill up charge traps as much as possible so that passing images are distorted less. The dark vertical lines correspond to transient reduced exposure times triggered by the transit of very bright stars to avoid CCD pixels becoming unusably soaked with charge in those images. While primarily beneficial, these phenomena create additional complications in the processing of Gaia data.

"The second problem concerns the way Gaia data is acquired on board the satellite as a result of practical limitations in the volume of data being handled and transmitted back to Earth. In the image example above, most of the pixels see just sky rather than astrophysically interesting objects like stars. During read-out, the Gaia CCDs are configured to “window” the useful data such that most of the sky is excluded, save a small amount around each object. Scientifically interesting pixels within defined windows are digitised relatively slowly for accurate measurement of incident light intensity, while sky pixels are relatively quickly flushed and discarded in the read-out process. This quick-slow-quick read-out induces a rather complex pattern of systematic errors in the digitised data that have to be mimicked on-ground by reconstructing the read-out process and modelling the size of the effects.

"Working with scientists and engineers within ESA and the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium, a small team of scientists and software engineers based at the IfA in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Edinburgh is designing and implementing solutions in software to these challenging problems. The software will run in data processing pipelines running at various Gaia Data Processing Centres across Europe including Cambridge, Madrid, Barcelona and Paris."

UK participation in the mission is funded by the UK Space Agency. The UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) funded the early development of the project, including the set-up of the data applications centre. STFC’s current support involves the UK exploitation of the scientific data to be yielded from the mission.

Congratulations to students who received Medals and Certificates at the School of Physics & Astronomy awards ceremony held on 4 November 2013 in the Playfair Library.

The awards, presented by Head of School Arthur Trew, gave recognition to students who achieved outstanding marks during academic year 2012/13.

A total of 55 students from years 1 and 2 received Certificates of Merit to recognise their achievement in Physics and Maths courses. Class Medals were awarded to the Honours students with the highest overall mark for their degree programme, and to the Pre-Honours students with the highest marks achieved in core courses.

In addition, recognition was given to the top achieving students who received prizes and scholarships, including student Sabin Roman, who achieved the Tait Medal and Robert Schlapp Prize for the highest marks in Mathematical Physics.

Scientists at Edinburgh have helped create the most sensitive dark matter detector in the world, new results show.

Researchers have taken part in the first run of an underground detector known as Large Underground Xenon (LUX), situated a mile underground in a mine in South Dakota, US.

The detector is searching for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) – tiny, sub-atomic particles that indicate the existence of dark matter. Dark matter and dark energy are thought to account for about 95% of the Universe, but remain unseen. Initial results demonstrate that the LUX detector is working well, which fuels hope of detection of dark matter in the near future.

These first results, which reveal data from a run of more than 85 days, also rule out some existing theories of what comprises dark matter. 

“Understanding dark matter may well be the key to unlocking a much deeper understanding of the universe, and it is very fitting that Edinburgh should be part of the team making this progress now." Dr Alex Murphy, School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh

Dark matter has so far been observed only by its gravitational effects on galaxies and clusters of galaxies, despite being the predominant form of matter in the Universe. According to physics theory, WIMPs are the most likely particles to explain the dark matter. WIMPS are difficult to spot because they collide with normal matter only rarely, and their faint signals are drowned out by cosmic radiation from space.

The LUX detector

LUX has been designed to be the world's premier instrument in this area of physics and astronomy. It is housed deep underground where few cosmic ray particles can penetrate, and is held in a tank of purified water which further protects from background radiation given off by surrounding rock. 

The tank contains cooled liquid xenon, whose atoms, if struck by a WIMP, will recoil and give off light and a small electric charge. These electrons are drawn upward by an electrical field and interact with a thin layer of xenon gas at the top of the tank, releasing more photons. Light detectors in the top and bottom of the tank can spot any light emitted and measure the energy of the interaction, giving valuable information on the behaviour of the WIMP.

The LUX collaboration includes 17 research universities and national laboratories in the United States and Europe. Taking part from the United Kingdom are the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and University College London.