University of Southampton Astronomer Dr Anna Scaife has been selected by the World Economic Forum to join its 2014 Young Scientists Community.

Dr Scaife is one of 30 scientists from around the world who will engage with business and political leaders at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014 in Tianjin, China (on 10-12 September) to contribute their scientific perspective and identify emerging research trends.

The Annual Meeting of the New Champions brings together more than 1,900 participants from 90 countries under the theme, Creating Value through Innovation.

Dr Scaife has been selected for her work in developing new techniques for detecting and measuring magnetic fields in clusters of galaxies and the cosmic web using radio astronomy.

Dr Scaife says: “I am very grateful to the World Economic Forum for this honour and for the opportunities it has made available to me through the WEF network. Bringing together scientists with business and political leaders provides a unique platform in which to discuss and develop the social and economic impacts of scientific research. I hope that this opportunity will allow me to broaden the impact of my own research and also to highlight both the historical and immediate benefits of radio astronomy to a wider society.

“I would also like to thank the European Research Council, who support my research.â€? Each year the Forum identifies the best scientific minds, leading in the pursuit of answers for global impact and the common good. They are honoured for their contributions to advancing the frontiers of science, engineering or technology in areas of high societal impact.

More than 250 nominations were submitted from 21 leading global science institutions, including the European Research Council, Nature Magazine, Scientific American Magazine, National Institutes of Health, École Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, and the Global Young Academy.

Physics Nobel Laureate Professor Gerard ’t Hooft will discuss the elusive Higgs particle or ‘God-particle’, which is believed to be responsible for the origin of mass, at the University of Southampton next month.

Professor ’t Hooft will be giving the keynote lecture for the University’s Southampton Theory Astrophysics and Gravity (STAG) Research Centre on Wednesday 1 October at 2.30pm.

He will discuss how a recent discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, is most likely the long-sought Higgs particle. He will explore how the particle behaves and what particles we should be looking for next to understand the building blocks of our Universe.

STAG Director, Professor Chris Sachrajda, says: “It is a tremendous privilege to have Professor ’t Hooft delivering our keynote address. Fundamental questions about our Universe have been asked for thousands of years and I look forward to hearing Professor ’t Hooft’s insights.â€?

The STAG Research Centre brings together world-leading academics from three research groups – Theoretical Particle Physics, Astronomy and General Relativity – to improve our understanding of the Universe and the fundamental laws of nature.

Researchers are exploring issues of fundamental physics and astronomy such as the ultimate building blocks of matter; extreme environments generated by black holes and neutron stars, which power some of the most spectacular phenomena in the Universe; and the identity of dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 per cent of the Universe.

To book your free tickets for the talk, which is taking place at Turner Sims on the University’s Highfield campus, please follow the link above.

Scientists from the University of Southampton are to turn the Moon into a giant particle detector to help understand the origin of Ultra-High-Energy (UHE) cosmic rays - the most energetic particles in the Universe.

The origin of UHE cosmic rays is one of the great mysteries in astrophysics. Nobody knows where these extremely rare cosmic rays come from or how they get their enormous energies. Physicists detect them on Earth at a rate of less than one particle per square kilometre per century.

Dr Justin Bray, a Research Fellow in Cosmic Magnetism at the University of Southampton, is lead author of a proposal to use the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), set to become the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world, to detect vastly more UHE cosmic rays by using the Moon as a giant cosmic ray detector.

On Earth, physicists detect these high-energy particles when they hit the upper atmosphere triggering a cascade of secondary particles that generate a short and faint burst of radio waves only a few nanoseconds long.

It is this signal that astronomers hope to pick up from the Moon, but as these signals are so short and faint no radio telescope on Earth is currently capable of picking them up.

With its large collecting area and high sensitivity, the SKA will be able to detect these signals using the visible lunar surface - millions of square kilometres - giving the researchers access to more data about UHE cosmic rays than they have ever had before.

The current largest detector on Earth is the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina that covers an area of 3,000 square kilometres, about the size Luxembourg. The SKA will be more than 10 times larger (33,0000 square kilometres) and researchers hope to detect around 165 UHE cosmic rays a year from the Moon compared to the 15-a-year currently observed.

Dr Bray announced details of the project at a major SKA conference in Italy. He says: “Cosmic rays at these energies are so rare that you need an enormous detector to collect a significant number of them - but the moon dwarfs any particle detector that has been built so far. If we can make this work, it should give us our best chance yet to figure out where they’re coming from.â€?

Dr Bray is working with Professor Anna Scaife, also from Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton, who leads the development of the SKA’s Imaging Pipeline as part of the Science Data Processor (SDP) work package consortium.

Professor Scaife says: “Defining science goals for the telescope is crucial for ensuring that the appropriate technical capabilities are considered during the design phase.â€?

Using a network of radio antennas in the Southern hemisphere, the SKA will advance our understanding of how the Universe evolved and challenge Einstein’s theory of relativity. With receivers across Australia and Africa, its dishes and antennas will provide detailed information on the large scale 3D structure of the Universe.

When operational in the early 2020’s, the SKA radio telescope will produce more than 10 times the current global traffic of the Internet in its internal telecommunications system. To play back a single day’s worth of SKA data on an MP3 player would take about two million years.

Hundreds of people descended on the University of Southampton to hear Physics Nobel Laureate Professor Gerard ‘t Hooft give a keynote lecture at a special event organised by the Southampton Theory Astrophysics and Gravity (STAG) Research Centre.

Gerard enthralled the audience at the Turner Sims with his talk about the elusive Higgs particle or ‘God-particle’ that is believed to be responsible for the origin of mass.

He explained how a recent discovery at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Geneva, is most likely to be the long-sought Higgs particle. He explored how the particle behaved and what particles we should be looking for next to understand the building blocks of our Universe.

The Turner Sims concert hall was packed out for the event and included members of the public, University staff and students and schoolchildren from local schools and colleges – St Anne’s Catholic School, Richard Taunton Sixth Form College and Highbury College.

STAG Director Professor Chris Sachrajda said: “This was a tremendously successful event. We were pleased to see a full house present to hear Gerard deliver our keynote address. It was inspiring to hear his insights into the fundamental questions that have been asked for thousands of years about the Universe.â€?

The event was organised by the STAG Research Centre that brings together world-leading academics from three research groups – Theoretical Particle Physics, Astronomy, and General Relativity – to improve our understanding of the Universe and the fundamental laws of nature.

Researchers are exploring issues of fundamental physics and astronomy such as the ultimate building blocks of matter; extreme environments generated by black holes and neutron stars that power some of the most spectacular phenomena in the Universe; and the identity of dark matter and dark energy that make up 95 per cent of the Universe.

The lecture was also attended by the Mayor of Southampton Councillor Sue Blatchford and Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of Physical Sciences and Engineering – one of the faculties in which the STAG Research centre is based.

Postgraduate students; Rob Firth, Peter Jones, Anthony Preston, Ariana Christodoulou and Greg Ashton were also available to talk to the audience about their research.

University of Southampton scientists have designed a new experiment to test the foundations of quantum mechanics at the large scale. Standard quantum theory places no limit on particle size and current experiments use larger and larger particles, which exhibit wave-like behaviour. However, at these masses experiments begin to probe extensions to standard quantum mechanics, which describe the apparent quantum-to-classical transition.

Now, Southampton researchers, with colleagues from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, have designed a new type of experiment which will advance the current state-of-the-art experiments by a factor of 100, from 10,000 atomic mass units (amu), roughly equal to the mass of a single proton, to one million amu.

The research is published in Nature Communications.

They propose an interferometer with a levitated, optically cooled, and then free-falling silicon nanoparticle in the mass range of one million amu, delocalised over more than 150 nm. The scheme employs the near-field Talbot effect with a single standing-wave laser pulse as a phase grating.

Individual particles are dropped and diffracted by a standing UV laser wave, such that interference of neighbouring diffraction orders produces a resonant near-field fringe pattern. In order to record the interferogram, the nanospheres are deposited on a glass slide and their arrival positions are recorded via optical microscopy. The researchers argue that the choice of silicon, due to its specific material characteristics, will produce reliable high mass interference, unaffected by environmental decoherence, in a setup that can be produced with current technology.

Dr James Bateman, from Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton and co-author of the study, says: “This work is a natural extension of atomic physics, which has revolutionised many technologies. Our analysis, which accounts for all relevant sources of decoherence, indicates that this is a viable route towards macroscopic high-mass superpositions.

“This current work is not technology-driven, but it does ask difficult questions of relevance to future quantum devices. Placing larger and larger mechanical systems into quantum states has implications for what can be done with the technology. We hope that our work will lead to a better understanding of the fundamental physics and hence to more advanced quantum devices.â€? As time-of-flight, and therefore mass, is limited by the free-fall distance under earth’s gravity, a space-based mission is planned by the Macroscopic quantum resonators (MAQRO) consortium with which the researchers are involved; this could bring a further factor of 100 in mass.

One of the leading global conferences on particle physics will be held at the University of Southampton in July 2016.

The annual ‘International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory’ brings together a global community of researchers from theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory, who employ numerical and computational methods to study the properties of strongly interacting physical systems - above all Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory which describes the interactions of quarks and gluons. The Symposium is returning to the UK for the first time since 1997, when it took place in Edinburgh, and has never before been held in England.

The 2016 Symposium will take place at the University of Southampton’s Highfield Campus, and the Conference Chair is Professor Chris Sachrajda, FRS. "It is a great honour to be able to bring the annual Lattice Field Theory Symposium to Southampton," he said, "especially since the Southampton Lattice QCD group, currently led by Professor Jonathan Flynn, Dr Andreas Jüttner and myself, has been at the centre of developments since the early days of the subject in the 1980s."

He continues: "It was a particular pleasure that the 2012 Kenneth Wilson Prize, announced at the annual lattice symposium, was awarded for the thesis work of Southampton PhD student Elaine Goode, performed in collaboration with colleagues from Edinburgh, Columbia University and the Brookhaven National Laboratory."

Over 500 theoretical and computational physicists from all parts of the globe will visit Southampton between 24 and 30 July 2016 to discuss the latest progress in lattice field theory and to set the agenda for future research. The 25 or so invited plenary lecturers will review the status of the main areas and will be complemented by about 400 parallel talks and posters containing more specialised material as well as a public lecture which will convey the excitement of the conference beyond the particle physics community.

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, commented: "We very much look forward to welcoming the global particle physics community to the University in 2016. It is an excellent indication of the significant and longstanding research carried out here in our School of Physics and Astronomy that this International Symposium is coming to Southampton for its first visit to England".

Hundreds more schoolchildren and students will be able to marvel at the wonders of the Universe with the launch of the University of Southampton’s new mobile planetarium.

The new six-metre Soton Astrodome is set to accommodate up to 2,000 more people a year during its roadshow of school visits and public events.

Staff and students from Physics and Astronomy have been taking the existing dome into about 35 schools a year, putting on shows at the University, and attending events around the country such as the Big Bang Fair, in Birmingham; but the dome – the flagship of the University’s astronomy outreach programme – had been starting to show signs of wear and tear and needed to be replaced.

Winning an Education Enhancement Fund (EEF) grant of nearly £30,000 has enabled the team to purchase a bigger, better dome that can fit more people inside to watch its shows and learn about the visible Universe and what astronomers are doing to understand it.

Outreach Leader in Astronomy Dr Sadie Jones said: “Every year thousands of people get the opportunity to experience one of our planetarium shows. It is wonderful to be able to generate an interest in astronomy particularly in young people and this new bigger dome will allow us to inspire even more people by helping them investigate the night sky and ponder the big questions of the Universe.â€?

The new dome was launched by the University’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Don Nutbeam at a special ceremony.

He said: “This outreach programme is a great credit to the University. It is because of this type of outreach work that we have seen something of a renaissance in Physics and Astronomy at this University over the past decade. It is a great effort on the part of the staff and students to generate the interest of the next generation in astronomy.

“It is outreach activities like this that get young people really engaged and excited about astronomy and it is fantastic that this will continue with the new astrodome.â€?

Staff, students and their families were invited to the reception where they got the chance to enjoy a show in the new astrodome. During the ceremony Sadie paid tribute to the PhD and undergraduate students who help her take the astrodome to schools and public events.

She said: “I couldn’t do this work without such a great team of enthusiastic and knowledgeable students to support me.â€?

Four of these students were specifically recognised for their dedication and hard work. They were:

• Juan Hernandez - outstanding postgraduate award
• Cait Percy - outstanding undergraduate award
• Chris Frohmaier - dome managing on campus award
• Robert Firth - dome managing at schools award

The EEF was established by the University’s Executive Group to support innovative and creative projects that will add value to the student experience and help to make Southampton distinctive.

Researchers from the University of Southampton have developed a new technique to help produce more reliable and robust next generation photonic chips.

Photonic chips made from silicon will play a major role in future optical networks for worldwide data traffic. The high refractive index of silicon makes optical structures the size of a fraction of the diameter of a human hair possible. Squeezing more and more optical structures for light distribution, modulation, detection and routing into smaller chip areas allows for higher data rates at lower fabrication costs.

As the complexity of optical chips increases, testing and characterising such chips becomes more difficult. Light traveling in the chip is confined in the silicon, that is, it cannot be ‘seen’ or measured from the outside.

Southampton researchers have now developed a new method, which will help solve this problem, to find out at which time the light in the chip is at which position. The technique, called Ultrafast Photomodulation Spectroscopy (UPMS), uses ultraviolet laser pulses of femtosecond duration to change the refractive index of silicon in a tiny area on the photonic chip.

Non-contact characterisation tools like UPMS are vital for scientist designing complex photonic chips. The UPMS technique is fast and robust and has the potential to be used for industrial testing in the photonics industry.

The research is published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Photonics.

Dr Roman Bruck, from Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton and lead author of the study, says: “Monitoring the transmission of the chip while the refractive index is locally changed gives a precise picture of how the light flows through it. This allows testing of individual optical elements on the chip, a crucial step in the design optimisation to ensure its flawless operation. Because the changes induced by the technique are fully reversible, this testing method is non-destructive and after testing, the chip can be used for its intended application.â€?

The research team, from Physics and Astronomy and the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University, expects to establish the technique as a standard characterisation tool, making photonic chips under development more reliable and bringing them into the market quicker. The work has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The University of Southampton is part of a new £120 million national network of Quantum Technology Hubs, that willl put its cutting-edge research in quantum sensors at the forefront of future technologies to drive the UK’s economy.

The new network, announced today (Wednesday 26 November) by Greg Clark, Minister of State for Universities, Science and Cities, involves 17 universities and 132 companies. It will be funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) from the £270 million investment in the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme announced by the Chancellor, George Osborne in his Autumn Statement of 2013.

Greg Clark, Minister of State for Universities, Science and Cities said: “This exciting new Quantum Hubs network will push the boundaries of knowledge and exploit new technologies, to the benefit of healthcare, communications and security. “This investment in Quantum technologies has the potential to bring game-changing advantages to future timing, sensing and navigation capabilities that could support multi-billion pound markets in the UK and globally. “Today’s announcement is another example of the Government’s recognition of the UK’s science base and its critical contribution to our sustained economic growth.â€?

The network consists of four Hubs, which will be led by the universities of Birmingham, Glasgow, Oxford and York. Southampton scientists from Mathematical Sciences, Physics and Astronomy and the Optoelectronic Research Centre (ORC) will work across two of four Hubs, to develop quantum mechanical sensors and information processors and translate their research into prototype devices.

Southampton will receive £6.4 million, to invest in new equipment and research funding for Postdoctoral Fellows and staff time.

The research will produce new generations of motion, gravity and electromagnetic field sensors and information processing devices that use the quantum mechanical properties of light and matter, rather than conventional electronics and optics. Applications include ultra-precise navigation, civil engineering, medical imaging, security scanning and complex multi-variable computation.

Professor Peter Smith, from the ORC, said: “We are thrilled to be part of this major new national initiative. At Southampton, we will be building on decades of research in photonics and quantum physics, and using the state-of-the-art cleanrooms in our Mountbatten cleanroom facility. We will be gaining new manufacturing equipment that will allow us to fabricate new optical devices with nanometre precision and will be developing the new chips needed for quantum technology.â€?

Professor Philip Nelson, EPSRC’s Chief Executive and former Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton, said: “These new hubs will build on our previous investments in quantum science. They will draw together scientists, engineers and technologists from across the UK who will explore how we can exploit the intriguing properties of the quantum realm. The area offers great promise, and the hubs will keep the UK at the leading edge of this exciting field.â€?

Michael Bargeron, a 2nd year MPhys with Astronomy student was selected to represent the UK following his performance at the World University Shooting Championships this year.

The World University Shooting Championships are run every two years in different countries across the world. In 2014, it was held in Al Ain, UAE with four UK athletes representing BUCS (British Universities and Colleges Sports).

The University was able to provide £950 funding for Michael through the G F Forsey fund. Michael believes that without it he would not have been able to partake in the Championships and compete against some of the best in the world.

This experience helped him greatly to gain insight into a major world competition and he is hoping to put newly learnt skills into action over the coming years. Mike received training on this trip from English and Scottish commonwealth coaches which will benefit the Southampton University Rifle Club as a whole.

The 2015 World University Games will take place in Gwangju, Korea between 3 - 14 July.