Professor Anne Tropper has been presented the 2021 SPIE Maiman Laser Award for pioneering contributions during a dynamic research career at the University of Southampton.

The prestigious honour from the international society for optics and photonics recognises the physicist's key advancements in rare-earth doped fibre and optically pumped semiconductor lasers.

Anne is a founding member of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at Southampton, one of the world's leading institutes for photonics research, and served as head of the Quantum, Light and Matter group between 2007 and 2012.

She has been based at the University of Southampton since 1983 and maintains this longstanding connection today as an Emeritus Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy.

Anne says: "I am deeply honoured to receive this prize named after Theodore Maiman, creator of the first working laser. It is a testament to the vision of the individuals in Physics and Astronomy who set up the Laser Physics Group and gave so much support and encouragement to my endeavours.

"My original realisation of lasers constructed not around optical rods but optical fibres, embodying a paradigm shift that transformed every aspect of the physics and engineering of these light sources. As a result, we have lasers and amplifiers that are sturdy, energy-efficient, broad-band and spectrally versatile, with transformative impact in technologies ranging from data communications to surgery to industrial production."

The Southampton professor's influence in optical physics over the past 40 years has touched the work of many groups in fields that include fibre lasers and amplifiers, upconversion lasers, spin dynamics in semiconductors, and ultrafast semiconductor laser physics.

She was the first to demonstrate the ytterbium silica fibre laser and highlight the unique potential of this system for efficient high-power operation, a discovery that today forms the basis of the high-power fibre laser market for industrial manufacturing.

New fibre lasers first reported by her group at Southampton include thulium and holmium silica in the mid-infrared, and infrared-pumped visible lasers based on praseodymium-doped fluoride glass.

The SPIE Maiman Laser Award is named in honour of Theodore Maiman, an American physicist and engineer who is widely credited with the invention of the laser. The honour was established in 2020 and recognises sustained contributions to laser source science and technology at the highest levels.

SPIE's 2021 society awards have been announced this month for 21 distinguished recipients whose achievements span a wide range of light-based sciences and key advancements made by these technologies in areas including medicine, astronomy, lithography and optical metrology.

Researchers at the University of Southampton will break new ground in astronomy and space environment physics in over £3 million of diverse research funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

Eight projects will be advanced in the School of Physics and Astronomy over the next three years, covering a wide range of theoretical and observational work in stellar-mass and supermassive black holes, supernovae, and planetary magnetospheres.

The novel research, based in the Southampton Astronomy Group and Space Environment Physics Group, will be driven forward by leading scientists with a team of postdoctoral research associates, and showcased beyond the University in a suite of public engagement activities.

Professor Mark Sullivan, Head of Physics and Astronomy, says: "The quality and innovative nature of these ambitious projects further reinforces our long-standing reputation for world-leading research in these fields. This is an exceptional outcome in a very challenging funding climate, and I look forward to seeing the impact of this ground-breaking work in the coming years."

Seven of the Southampton projects will focus on new advances in astronomy, with a specific focus on compact objects and their origins.

Professor Poshak Gandhi will investigate the formation channels of black holes in one strand by consolidating state-of-the-art astrometric measurements with multiwavelength characterisation. Professor Sullivan will be undertaking a study of 3,000 supernovae from the optical Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) with the new spectroscopic facility 4MOST, exploiting Southampton-led involvement in a UK-based consortium.

Dr Matthew Middleton is further developing the application of a completely new technique to isolate black hole ultraluminous X-ray sources. Dr Diego Altamirano will address key questions in accretion physics by exploiting a Southampton-led fast optical camera, OPTICam, together with unique access to the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) and AstroSat space observatories.

Professor Christian Knigge will develop and test models for the disk winds in active galactic nuclei, the compact region at the centre of galaxies hosting supermassive black holes. Professor Ian McHardy will explore X-ray, radio and UV-optical connections to build understanding of the inner geometry and emission processes of these accreting supermassive black holes. In a further project, Professor Sebastian Hoenig and Professor Francesco Shankar will collaborate on three dimensional radiation-hydrodynamic simulations that will address the question of how supermassive black holes merge as the final process of galaxy collisions.

Within the Space Environment Physics Group, Dr Robert Fear and Dr Imogen Gingell will address questions about how the Earth's magnetosphere responds to the solar wind on a large scale. The nature of this interaction depends on the orientation of the interplanetary magnetic field, which is associated with the solar wind.

The project will use satellite observations to test mechanisms that have been advocated for previously observed complex structure in the magnetosphere. This will enable the team to hunt for the signature of that structure's predicted interaction with the solar wind, and to investigate equivalent structure present in global simulations of the magnetosphere.

Physicists at the University of Southampton are studying molecular vibrations that could shine new light on how plants convert sunlight into energy.

An experimental group, led by Dr Luca Sapienza, is investigating how photosynthetic organisms exploit mechanical vibrations in energy transfer processes.

The new research could help scientists reverse engineer the natural processes to realise new devices with enhanced energy capture and transfer capabilities.

Plants, algae and some bacteria rely on nano-scale molecular complexes to absorb sunlight and trigger the chemical energy conversion that sustains life processes on Earth.

These complexes are thought to benefit from molecular vibrations, but exactly how these affect the efficiency, directionality and quantum properties of energy dynamics is yet to be fully understood.

To gain this understanding, Southampton researchers are investigating how bio-molecules transfer energy within the controlled vibrational environment provided by opto-mechanical on-chip devices, where sunlight is replaced by excitation laser sources.

Dr Sapienza, of the Quantum, Light and Matter research group, says: "By investigating bio-molecules embedded within nano-fabricated devices that can control mechanical vibrations, this research will shine new light onto the microscopic processes that control energy dynamics at the molecular scale."

Within photosynthetic complexes, precisely arranged chromophores are bound to a protein scaffold and the absorption of light leads to the formation of collective electronic states, called excitons. The associated electronic energy is distributed and transferred to lower energy states at a pico-second rate.

There is mounting experimental and theoretical evidence that a sophisticated interplay between electronic and vibrational dynamics underpins the efficiency of the process.

"This line of thought has led to the counterintuitive idea that phonon-assisted processes, resulting from the coupling of biomolecules to their vibrational environment, rather than being detrimental, can actually improve the efficiency and directionality of the energy transfer and can sustain quantum coherent processes," Dr Sapienza says.

"The leading hypothesis to explain the mechanism at the basis of how these systems function is the presence of coherent vibronic interactions, whereby specific vibrational motions are driven out of thermal equilibrium to form exciton vibrational quantum states. The interpretation of how such process occurs, however, remains still controversial."

The latest research, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will use on-chip opto-mechanical devices, developed for semiconductor technology, as a new platform to control the phononic environment of photo-active biomolecules.

The devices are designed to control the amplitude of specific vibrational frequencies involved in photosynthetic processes. By characterising the emission dynamics and correlations of the photons emitted by the biomolecules, the research team will investigate the influence of the phononic environment.

Dr Sapienza says: "While opto-mechanics is a well-established research area, with great potential in metrology and force-sensing applications, the integration of biomolecules within phononic membranes is an exciting and completely novel field."

"The realisation of this platform opens the path to reverse-engineering biological architectures, that have been optimised by evolution over billions of years, to develop hybrid biomechanical units exploiting coherence to enhance the harvesting and transfer of energy."

Dr Sapienza is one of three academics from the University of Southampton awarded a total of £600,000 from the EPSRC New Horizons call; a programme aimed at high-risk discovery research focused on advancing knowledge and securing the pipeline of next-generation innovations.

Professor Jonathan Essex is investigating molecular simulations, which are an essential tool in the design of new drugs, while Dr Alain Zemkoho is exploring 'pessimistic bilevel optimisation' problems between various engineering, economic and human systems.

PC gamers will journey deep into the universe and dictate the fate of galaxies in the next phase of an advanced cosmological visualisation tool developed at the University of Southampton.

The Astera visualiser can render millions of galaxies simultaneously to offer a scientifically and visually accurate, interactive view of the extragalactic universe.

Professor Francesco Shankar from the Southampton Astronomy Group has now received follow-on funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to gamify the experience and stream it online.

The immersive software was created by postgraduate research student Chris Marsden, part of Southampton’s EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Next Generation Computational Modelling (NGCM), to allow users to fly through and explore the wider universe, with dynamic first-person control.

Chris says: "If you were to do the impossible and ‘zoom out’ our view of the universe to perceive it on the largest scales, you would see billions of galaxies scattered like glittering jewels on a pall of dark velvet.

"You would see the vast diversity in galaxy structure with colossal, ancient elliptical galaxies and intricate, tightly wound spiral galaxies. The variation in colours would be dazzlingly beautiful, and the large scale structures that galaxies arrange themselves, following mysterious, veiled dark matter.

"This 'God's eye view' of the universe has existed only in the minds of astronomers, until now. Large scale, extragalactic astronomy is particularly hard to visualize using conventional methods, primarily due to the vast range of length scales and its complex spatial and temporal structure; Astera provides the solution, rendering the extragalactic universe in real-time 3D."

Astera combines the latest advances in large scale computer simulations and computer graphics to simulate cutting edge physics in the extragalactic universe. The platform runs on a modified version of the Unreal Engine and uses hundreds of galaxy images extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The platform is based on novel, data-driven, phenomenological models characterised by a 'bottom-up' approach.

"The least possible assumptions and associated parameters initially define the models," Francesco explains. "Additional degrees of complexities can be gradually included, if needed, allowing for extreme flexibility and transparency, avoiding the risk of being clouded by an initially too heavy parameterisation.

"Our data-driven approach substantially lowers the number of assumptions and free parameters compared to many competing modelling approaches, and it is particularly suited to create flexible and accurate 3D renditions of the visible Universe on very large scales."

Astera has received funding from a range of sources including technology company Nvidia. An Impact Acceleration Account grant is also preparing the platform to be installed as an exhibit at the Winchester Science Centre.

Francesco wants the next phase of the project to capture the imaginations of the general public and inspire a new generation of astronomers.

"Our upgraded Astera will merge the most recent cutting-edge results in galaxy evolution with a unique game that encompasses the whole scale of the observable universe," he says. "In Astera, a player will be able to control the evolution of a galaxy over its lifetime, perhaps choosing when star formation will occur, or when a galaxy will merge, and witness first-hand the consequences of these processes on the shape and evolution of galaxies.

"The player will thus be able to enjoy, visualise and at the same time learn about the main physical events in the lives of galaxies."

Artists depicted the scientific marvels of black hole astronomy research in an international art-science competition led by the University of Southampton and supported by NASA.

The Astroarteagujero competition, hosted by the Astronomy Group, invited Spanish speaking amateur and professional artists to learn about black hole research based on NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) mission, and express their new-found inspiration and knowledge through artwork.

The competition, which was supported by NASA/NICER, The Royal Society and CienciaEs.com, encouraged more than 160 artists from 15 countries to submit more than 260 pieces of art.

Southampton's Argentinian Astronomy Lecturer Dr Diego Altamirano inspired participants with insights into the latest astronomy research in his Spanish language podcast Agujeros negros en el Universo (Black Holes in the Universe).

The winning entries from the four different age groups have been celebrated as NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) Picture of the Week, with all submissions available to view on the Astroarteagujero Facebook group.

Dr Altamirano, Principal Research Fellow, says: "I wanted to share the knowledge I have gained in the last 15 years with a wider international audience. As Spanish is my first language we've reached out to a global Spanish-speaking audience who has really engaged with the concept of combining art and astronomy in this competition. We have been very impressed by the range and standard of entries."

"I'm thrilled that 90 percent of participants say they investigated black holes further because of the podcast and competition. Three quarters of these ‘astro-artists’ also said that the competition had a positive effect on how they see astronomy, astronomers, and science in general."

The NASA NICER mission allows astronomers to study extremes of gravity, matter, density and electromagnetic fields through readings taken from the International Space Station. Its achievements included the ground-breaking discovery of the contraction of the X-ray corona in a black hole transient, which was reported in Nature.

Astroarteagujero's over 18s category was won by Mexican artists Christian Zamarripa Rivera and Estevan Barrón (top left). The 12 to 17 years age group was won by Ecuadorian artist Domenica Nuñez del Arco Abad (bottom centre) together with Mexican artist Gabriela Higinio (bottom left), with the 7 to 11 years age group secured by Argentinian artist Ariel Tagliebue (bottom right) and the under 6s category awarded to Mexican artist Alan Nevarez Marquez (top centre).

Innovative technologies developed by researchers at the University of Southampton will be unveiled in an online edition of the world’s largest and most influential technology show, CES 2021.

Aquark Technologies, founded by quantum physicist Dr Andrei Dragomir, has developed a miniaturised cold atom system that will help enable the next generation of revolutionary technologies.

The business is one of eight startups exhibiting at CES 2021 through Future Worlds, the on-campus startup accelerator at the University of Southampton.

Aquark Technologies builds upon cutting-edge research in the School of Physics and Astronomy's Quantum, Light and Matter Group.

Unlike modern electronics, which rely on the manipulation of electrons, quantum devices tap into the potential of new physics exploring tiny energy levels of atoms and sub-atomic particles. Aquark Technologies' innovation vastly reduces the size of a core component of quantum technology, turning these incredible but complex devices into simple to use, plug-and-play systems.

"The emerging generation of quantum devices will revolutionise countless industries," Andrei says. "Aquark Technologies’ miniaturised cold atom system can accomplish all the tasks of the conventional system for a fraction of the weight, size and power requirements."

CES usually takes place in Las Vegas and attracts over 170,000 visitors who flock to see the newest technology being showcased by the 4,000+ tech firms in attendance. 2021 sees the event go all-digital, taking the global reach of CES wider than ever before.

Future Worlds is returning to CES for a sixth consecutive year as the UK’s only exhibiting university.

Current University of Southampton startups being exhibited at CES 2021 also include Absolar, an AI-powered software that simulates solar radiation to inform renewable energy decisions, ArchAI, a deep learning tool for construction planners to automate archaeology assessments, Inpulse, smart clothing to correct muscle imbalances and improve sports performance, and Sentient Sports, an AI platform that assists football managers by predicting how players will perform.

Ben Clark, Future Worlds Director, says: "We are very excited as Southampton steps up as the only university representing the UK at CES for a sixth consecutive year. The startups we have selected to exhibit are inspirational future leaders in their field, destined to make a huge change in the world of AI and quantum.

"More startups than ever before are exhibiting with Future Worlds at this year’s CES, reflecting the immeasurable vision, talent and determination to push through the pandemic to help create a more sustainable, connected and healthy world to come."

An interdisciplinary research institute directed within the University of Southampton has welcomed new partners from King's College London (KCL) as it continues pushing the boundaries of particle physics.

The NExT Institute, directed by Physics and Astronomy's Professor Stefano Moretti, has announced a new affiliation with KCL's Theoretical Particle Physics & Cosmology (TPPC) and Experimental Particle & Astroparticle Physics (EPAP) groups.

The Institute fosters interactions between theory and experiment in an interdisciplinary and multi-sited environment to accelerate advances in its field.

KCL are the sixth organisation to formally join the partnership since it was founded by the Southampton High Energy Physics (SHEP) group and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in 2006.

Professor Moretti says: "This is a very welcome strategic development that testifies to the visibility and impact that NExT has been able to attain in the ever more important area of interface work between theory and experiment in particle physics.

"We are at an exciting time when many ground and space-based worldwide facilities are taking data that promise to open new windows of understanding on how the Universe works, and I believe that only a concerted effort between these two communities can ensure progress is made in the field at large.

"I am delighted that both KCL's theoretical and experimental particle physics groups are joining NExT. The university's scientific calibre and wide span of research is the perfect fit for the Institute and I look forward to KCL contribution towards both the NExT training and research programmes bearing future success."

The NExT Institute network also includes Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the University of Sussex.

Traditional interactions between experimentalists and theorists had revolved for decades around theorists picking up information from data based on experimental presentations in public meetings and published papers. This is both slow and inefficient and can, in the worst cases, lead to misinterpretations of data.

The NExT Institute focuses on developing one-to-one interactions between experimentalists and theorists, by connecting the latter to the analyses carried out by the former.

This has been successfully implemented over the years through countless cross-institutional positions at PhD, postdoctoral research assistant (PDRA) and staff level, joint between theory and experiment as well as between the nodes of the Institute.