Dr Peder Norberg of the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) is among the Royal Society's 30 new University Research Fellows (URFs) for 2010. He has also been awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC StG).
The combined value of the awards is around €1.8million over approximately five years. Both awards are intended to support outstanding early-career researchers and enable them to carry out their pioneering ideas.
Peder's research aims to critically test the successful Cold Dark Matter model, and improve our knowledge of galaxy formation and Dark Energy. The ERC citation noted the IfA's strong record of research in this area.
Peder said: 'The combination of these awards presents a unique opportunity to establish myself as a true leader in my field and build a full research team to critically test the most successful cosmological model to date - the standard Cold Dark Matter model – and to provide key insights into the formation of galaxies over time. This frontier research utilizes the most recent galaxy surveys, including the Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey, of which I am Co-Project Leader, and the proprietary Pan-STARRS PS1 survey.'
Peder’s ERC Starting Grant is one of five awarded to the University this year and there are now three ERC grant holders at the IfA, making it unusually successful among astronomy institutes in this respect.
Below, Peder explains the background to his work.
ERC Starting Grants
ERC Starting Grants are prestigious awards which allow researchers in any subject (save nuclear research) who finished their PhD 2-12 years ago to undertake cutting-edge research at any European research institution. Awards last for up to 5 years and provide significant funding – up to EUR 1.5 million – to support the investigator and team. While the scheme is competitive, more cash is being invested in it each year by the European Commission.
Anyone in the School who would like to apply for ERC funding should first contact David Dougal at ERI: David.Dougal [at] ed.ac.uk Tel: 0131 650 9025
A universe filled with undetected cold dark matter and mysterious dark energy
Dr Peder Norberg
Galaxies are not distributed uniformly: they tend to clump together in groups and clusters. Our grasp of this distribution was revolutionised by the "Sloan Digital Sky Survey" (SDSS) and the "2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey", which mapped out the distances of millions of bright galaxies by measuring their redshift.
This key information on how galaxies are distributed in space contributed directly towards a standard model that describes the observed Universe, composed of three parts: ~5% ordinary matter; ~20% Cold Dark Matter (CDM), a theoretically motivated materia, yet to be directly detected; ~75% Dark Energy, a hypothetical form of energy filling the entire Universe. Hence we are faced with a real enigma as 95% of the content of the Universe is unknown to mankind. This drives my quest to further test the validity of the successful CDM model and to better understand what Dark Energy is.
Gama: a multi-wavelength and spectroscopic survey to test a key model prediction
The properties of CDM are accurately predicted via computer models. Dark Matter tends to cluster, forming large clumps (halos) connected by filaments, creating a so-called cosmic web. This is very similar to the observed distribution of galaxies. In this structure formation model, CDM becomes hence the natural skeleton on which galaxies form and evolve. The main problem is the lack of a distinct proof of its existence, including its non-detection in underground experiments.
I am a co-leader of the "Galaxy And Mass Assembly" (GAMA) redshift survey. GAMA will measure 400,000 new galaxy redshifts and provide a complete account of all galaxy positions in the nearby Universe. It is designed to provide a constraint to a key CDM model prediction, as given by the number of Dark Matter halos per unit volume as function of their mass. Our estimate will rely on counting the number of galaxy groups in GAMA and measuring their masses. Such analyses require the use of many state-of-the-art mock Universes, created from large CDM simulations populated with galaxies following either some galaxy formation recipe or some statistical framework calibrated on real GAMA data.
Pan-STARRS: a unique imaging survey to probe the properties of Dark Energy
Dark Energy, unlike CDM, is theoretically poorly understood and observationally its properties are barely constrained. This led to the construction of several gigantic galaxy surveys, including Pan-STARRS, with main cosmological aim to determine whether Dark Energy changes with time. To help answer that crucial question, my goal is to study the galaxy distribution in Pan-STARRS and quantify its degree of clumpiness at times when the Universe was just half its current age.
Unlike GAMA, Pan-STARRS is an imaging survey with approximate estimates of galaxy distances. Those photometric distances rely on observations at different wavelengths and extra input, like the composition of galaxies and stellar evolution. Their uncertainty and the planned survey sizes are such that new dedicated clustering techniques have to be developed to best extract the underlying signal. Within Pan-STARRS, I lead the group that considers these new statistics, with which we aim to characterise the relation between the observed galaxy light and the underlying mass over time. This work is a vital step towards measuring the evolution of Dark Energy.
The School of Physics and Astronomy has been awarded “Juno Practitioner” status by the Institute of Physics.
Project Juno recognises and rewards Physics departments and schools that address the under-representation of women in university Physics. It also encourages better working practices for both women and men. The “Juno Practitioner” award recognises the excellent work done by the School to apply the Juno programme’s principles.
Cait MacPhee, the School of Physics and Astronomy’s Juno Champion, said: “We are delighted that the IoP has awarded us Juno Practitioner status and we are eager to move forward to become Juno Champions.
“Our submission highlighted some areas of which we can be very proud, including increasing equality of representation in academic staff, and our higher-than-the-national-average proportions of women at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. We will focus now on career development for all staff and students, to ensure equality of opportunity for men and women at all stages of their career.”
The Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) has given high priority to Project Juno, with all its partner institutions signing up to the Juno principles. Edinburgh and Glasgow universities have both now successfully achieved “Practitioner” status.
The five Juno principles are:
1) a robust organisational framework to deliver equality of opportunity and reward;
2) an appointment and selection processes and procedures that encourage men and women to apply for academic posts at all levels;
3) departmental structures and systems which support and encourage the career progression and promotion of all staff and enable men and women to progress and continue in their careers;
4) departmental organisation, structure, management arrangements and culture that are open, inclusive and transparent and encourage the participation of all staff;
5) flexible approaches and provisions that enable individuals, at all career and life stages, to optimise their contribution to their department, institution and to SET (science, engineering, technology and the built environment).
This talk explores major aspects of the life and work of Charles Piazzi Smyth: one of the best-known and most fascinating scientists in Victorian Edinburgh.
This talk explores major aspects of his life and work, focusing especially on Smyth's fascination with Egypt and Egyptology, a major fashion of nineteenth century Scottish culture and a vital element both in the arts and sciences of the period. Smyth's passion for Egypt, which brought him into violent conflict with the Royal Society of London and many other organisations, reveals much of what drove the sciences in the nineteenth century and the way they advanced.
The talk will feature some of Piazzi Smyth's original artefacts from the Museum's collections. There will also be a chance to see the Museum's slice-of-life character of Piazzi Smyth's (fictional) 2nd assistant.
This event is part of the UNDERSTANDING TECHNOLOGY series of public lectures, which presents leading international research and ideas in the history, philosophy, politics and sociology of technology.
Date:
Thursday, 11 November 2010
Time:
6pm
Venue
Early People Gallery, National Museums Scotland
Registration
Please register with Maureen Kerr on 0131 247 4274 or m.kerr [at] nms.ac.uk
Admission
Free and open to all
Speaker:
Professor Simon Schaffer
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge University
Event Type:
General Event
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Prof. Andre Geimand and Dr Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester, for their experimental isolation of graphene, a layer of graphite just 1 atom thick (KS Novoselov et al., Science 306, 666 (2004)).
This breakthrough consisted of depositing thin layers of graphite on silicon, then peeling successive atomic layers off with Scotch tape until only 1 layer remained. The technique produces a small number of crystals of monolayer graphene surrounded by a large number of thicker crystallites (see photo), but it was possible to identify the single atomic layers with the naked eye in an optical microscope, provided that the correct thickness of SiO2 had been deposited on the Silicon substrate.
The explosion of scientific interest in graphene which followed was due to its unique electronic bandstructure in which the electrons behave as massless Dirac Fermions, mimicking relativistic particles. The quantum Hall effect and ballistic transport have been observed in graphene at room temperature, leading to its development for a wide variety of applications in electronics. Its high surface-area-to-volume ratio and strength are leading to applications in materials science and surface science.
Recently, researchers from the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions (CSEC) and the School of Physics have been collaborating with Dr. Novoselov to produce the first study of graphene under hydrostatic pressure (JE Proctor, E Gregoryanz, KS Novoselov, M Lotya, JN Coleman and MP Halsall, Phys. Rev. B 80, 073408 (2009)).
The importance of this work lies in graphene’s potential applications in electronics (for which the changes to the electronic bandstructure caused by strain are important), and graphene’s proposed applications as an ultra-sensitive strain sensor.
The work is an example of the application of CSEC’s world-leading expertise in high pressure science to the study of novel and technologically important materials, to gain important and fundamental information about these materials.
The first major radio telescope to be built in Britain for decades was officially opened on 20th September.
Based at Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire, the LOFAR-UK telescope will use simple dipole antennas to ‘listen’ to the Universe at FM frequencies. It will tackle a diverse range of science problems, including detecting when the first stars were formed, revealing how black holes evolved and mapping the structure of the solar wind and its interaction with the Earth.
The new telescope is part of the European LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) project, which is creating a network of over 5000 separate antennas. LOFAR works at the lowest frequencies accessible from Earth and, combined with advanced computing, allows wide areas of the sky to be surveyed. The LOFAR antennas will eventually be grouped into 'stations' all over Europe, including the Chilbolton Observatory, to form the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope.
Dr Philip Best, a reader at the Institute for Astronomy, is the deputy leader of the LOFAR-UK project. Dr Best said: “LOFAR’s field of view and sensitivity mean that it can survey the sky orders of magnitude faster than other radio telescopes and it has opened up huge new possibilities for astronomers.The addition of the UK station in Chilbolton doubles the level of detail we can see in the images produced by LOFAR.”
Dr Rob Fender of the University of Southampton, Principal Investigator of the LOFAR-UK project said "The most amazing thing is that these small dipole antennas can pick up faint radio signals from over 10 billion years ago, when the Universe was a fraction of its current size, and that this signal can be mapped over the entire sky by the telescope without a single moving part."
Above image shows the radio Universe as seen at 408 MHz. LOFAR will be able to see this with greater detail at even lower frequency.
The installation of the 96 radio antennas that make up the Chilbolton station was completed by scientists from a consortium of 22 British universities, including Edinburgh, together with the SEPnet consortium and the UK Science and Technologies Facilities Council, making it the largest radio astronomy consortium in the country.
The telescope was officially opened by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the first radio pulsars. During the inauguration ceremony, guests observed a pulsar in real time using the Chilbolton station.
The LOFAR project is led by ASTRON in the Netherlands, where the majority of the telescope and the data processing capabilities are located. Additional powerful international stations are located in Germany, France, Sweden andthe UK.
LOFAR-UK is funded through a collaboration of 22 UK universities with the SEPnet consortium and the UK Science and Technologies Facilities Council.
Above image shows the radio Universe as seen at 408 MHz. LOFAR will be able to see this with greater detail at even lower frequency.
The 2010 European High Pressure Research Group (EHPRG) Award has been won by Dr Olga Degtyareva, a Fellow of the Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems (ICMCS), the Extreme Conditions Physics group at the Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions.
Dr Degtyareva was presented with the award of €500 and delivered a plenary talk at the 48th EHPRG meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, in July 2010.
She said: "I am very pleased to receive this recognition, which is such a prestigious award in the field of high-pressure research. I very much enjoyed giving the plenary lecture. It was very well received, with lots of questions from the audience at the end of the presentation."
The award recognises Olga’s contribution to the study of pressure-induced complexity in simple elements. Her work spans 10 years, starting with PhD studies under the supervision of Malcolm McMahon and Richard Nelmes. It continued with a Carnegie Fellowship and a post-doctoral position at the Geophysical Laboratory in USA where Olga worked in the high-pressure group of Rus Hemley and Dave Mao and started her productive collaboration with Eugene Gregoryanz, now reader in CSEC.
Returning to the University of Edinburgh in 2006 as a postdoc, Olga received a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship to continue her work on complex high-pressure phases of elements. This Fellowship has allowed her to combine work with caring for two children.
Olga’s research has resulted in numerous publications, including five in Physical Review Letters and two in Nature Materials. It will also appear as a review in the next issue of the journal High Pressure Research.
Discussing the benefits of the award, Olga said: "It was very timely as the preparation for the lecture allowed me to take a fresh look at the systematics of the high-pressure behaviour of elements that will constitute the core of the review due to be published next month".
The image below shows one of the discoveries made by Olga and her co-workers. The crownlike eight-member ring molecules of sulphur (S-I, blue) break apart under pressure to form chains (S-II). At higher pressure, they rearrange themselves into denser chains forming the S-III phase, the crystal structure of which was uncovered in Olga’s work.
A spin-out company formed by staff at the Institute for Astronomy has secured a six-figure investment sum. The company will exploit patented software that was originally developed by the University to determine the age of stars. However the technology can be applied to many sectors where processing large amounts of data is routine, including seismic interpretation for oil and gas surveying, and fast image analysis for defence.
Blackford’s initial focus has been on medical imaging, where its technology can improve the diagnosis process for MRI and CT scans by automatically preparing images for radiologists.
Dr Ben Panter, CEO of Blackford Analysis, said: “The potential to save radiologist time is exciting. We already have concrete interest in further development from several significant industry players and there is similar potential in many other fields where large datasets require fast analysis.
“It’s been an exciting journey to get to this stage and we’re very pleased to secure this cash. Now we can really start to penetrate medical imaging and other markets.”
Blackford Analysis uses the MOPED algorithm, originally invented by Professor Alan Heavens of the Institute for Astronomy. Heavens and Panter’s work created a thousand-times increase in speed for the processing of galaxy spectra, and was used to determine the star formation history of the Universe.
Dr Panter said: “As datasets become larger, the cost of the hardware resources required to tackle them rocket and the case for MOPED is even more compelling. The MOPED algorithm vastly reduces that hardware cost, and the patented technology means that no other company in the world can do what Blackford Analysis can, solving emerging issues in an elegant and resourceful manner.”
A working demo of the product will be shown to potential customers at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference in November 2010.
Blackford Analysis is based at offices at The Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill.
Dr Catherine Heymans, an Advanced Fellow of the Institute for Astronomy, has been named as one of the eight final candidates for the 2010 L’Oréal UNESCO ‘For Women In Science’ Fellowships.
The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony at the Royal Institution in London on 30 June 2010. Four outstanding female scientists will be awarded fellowships of £15,000 each.
Catherine’s research interests lie in Cosmology and Extragalactic Astronomy and she has been shortlisted for her efforts to determine how Dark Matter is distributed throughout the Universe. If successful, she plans to use her grant to support research travel.
The four winners will be selected by a panel of eminent scientists, chaired by Baroness Susan Greenfield.
The fellowships, now in their twelfth year internationally, promote the importance of ensuring greater participation of women in science by offering awards to outstanding female postdoctoral researchers.
The fellowships have been designed to provide practical help for the winners to undertake research in their chosen fields. Winners may choose to spend their fellowship on whatever they need to continue their research.
The awards are run in partnership with the UK National Commission for UNESCO, the Irish National Commission for UNESCO and the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
A new standard has been set in astronomy as the Pan-STARRS sky survey telescope begins scanning the skies nightly with the world's largest digital camera.
While searching for asteroids that threaten Earth, the PS1 telescope is also mapping the Universe and investigating its biggest mysteries: dark matter and dark energy.
Three UK universities are part of the international science consortium designing the telescope's science mission. Scientists from the University of Durham, University of Edinburgh and Queen's University Belfast are spearheading searches for supernovae, Near-Earth asteroids and the fundamental nature of the Universe.
Conceived and designed at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, the observatory sits atop the dormant volcano Haleakala.
With a 1.8-metre primary mirror, the PS1 telescope is modest in size, but it has an extraordinary field of view— seven times bigger than typical survey instruments.
Mounted on the back of the telescope is the refrigerator-sized 1400 megapixel camera that makes PS1 the world's most powerful survey telescope. This sensitive digital camera was regarded as an unreachable dream just a few years ago.
PS1 takes an image every 30 seconds, each one 200 times larger than a typical photograph. The wealth of astronomical information in these images can only be extracted by a complex computing endeavour that processes the images, identifies and catalogues astronomical objects, and classifies their attributes.
The completed archive will be several peta-bytes in size, enough to fill several thousand top-end PC hard disks.
"PS1 will generate the largest ever multi-coloured survey of the cosmos. Alongside supercomputer simulations of the Universe, these data will help us understand the life cycles of galaxies and, if we are very lucky, the nature of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that control the evolution of our cosmos," said Prof. Carlos Frenk of Durham University, the UK's member on the Pan-STARRS board.
The Royal Observatory Edinburgh has a long history of survey astronomy. Prof. Alan Heavens of the University's Institute for Astronomy (IfA) said: "PS1 is a beautifully-designed instrument that will enable lots of different science, and IfA scientists will be playing key roles in many areas."
Prof. Heavens uses Einstein's theory of general relativity to understand how galaxies can bend light and act as cosmic lenses: "We co-lead the gravitational lensing programme, looking for signs of gravitational bending. This is an indicator of dark matter and dark energy, responsible for the dominant force driving the acceleration of the Universe.
"We are also looking at the clustering of galaxies to help us better understand the contents of the Universe and its past and future."
"There are still big challenges ahead for us. Pan-STARRS has immense potential for mapping the distribution of matter in the Universe, even the unseen dark matter. Our goal is to do this over the majority of the sky for the first time."
One novel aspect is the ability to track fast moving objects and exploding stars across nearly the whole sky.
Prof. Stephen Smartt of Queen's University and Chair of the Pan-STARSS Science Council said: "The huge camera lets us map about one sixth of the sky every month, in five different colours. We compare every image with one taken previously and try to track everything that either moves or flashes.
"Already we have discovered hundreds of supernovae, some of them the most luminous explosions known."
Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System) exploits the unique combination of superb observing sites and technical and scientific expertise available in Hawaii.
The project plans to build the full four-telescope Pan-STARRS array that will quadruple the light-gathering capability of PS1.
Funding for the development of the observing system has been provided by the U.S. Air Force.
The PS1 Surveys have been made possible through contributions of the PS1 Science Consortium (PS1SC): the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii; the Pan-STARRS Project Office; the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany; the Johns Hopkins University; the University of Durham; the University of Edinburgh; the Queen's University Belfast; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; the Los Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; and the National Central University of Taiwan.
Image gallery
Schools of Physics and Chemistry combine to investigate the processes underlying conditions such as diabetes and cataracts.
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) has awarded £600,000 to an interdisciplinary collaboration between the School of Chemistry and the School of Physics and Astronomy.
The project, entitled “Biophysical dissection of protein nucleation using a combined experimental and computational approach”, will support research into the processes that drive diseases of ageing such as cataract and type-II diabetes.
It will employ close collaboration between experiment and simulation to better understand the earliest events in protein self-assembly at the single molecule level.
The normal self-assembly of proteins into structures containing many molecules is responsible for many biological functions and is essential to our well-being. Occasionally, due to a mutation or a change in environment, protein self-assembly takes place inappropriately. Small changes in very few molecules are sufficient to trigger “runaway” self-assembly. It is these changes, the triggering events, that are the focus for investigation.
Dr Cait MacPhee of the Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems said: “Solving big problems needs a multidisciplinary approach. We’re applying the tools of physics and chemistry to an important biological phenomenon.
“Protein self-assembly doesn’t just cause disease, it also offers us the potential for new materials, new foodstuffs and new medicines. But to exploit it or prevent it we need to control it, and to control it we need to understand the earliest steps, molecule by molecule.”
The project takes advantage of an existing research programme with IBM, and a new multidisciplinary collaboration with the University of Oxford and the National Physical Laboratory in London. It will be led by the School’s Dr Cait MacPhee and Prof Jason Crain, and the School of Chemistry’s Dr Perdita Barran. Research techniques will include ion mobility mass spectrometry, spectroscopic methods and advanced computer simulations.
The award is part of the Research Councils UK “Lifelong health and wellbeing” programme. This cross-council strategic priority reflects the unprecedented demographic change underway in the UK. The proportion of young people is declining whilst that of older people is increasing. The Councils recognise that there are considerable benefits to the UK of having an active and healthy older population with potential economic, social, and health gains associated with healthy ageing and reducing dependency in later life.
The project is part of a wider pan-Scotland SUPA initiative in the area of Physics and Life Sciences (PALS). PALS has been identified by SUPA as the major opportunity for growth in physics research in Scotland, and this is reflected by the recent establishment of £10 million research theme across the eight SUPA universities. Dr Cait MacPhee currently acts as PALS Theme Leader.