The University of Southampton has been placed 62nd for physics in the 2020 Best Global Universities rankings published by US News & World Report.

The influential international guide, which measures academic research performance as well as global and regional reputation, ranks the University sixth in the UK and 30th in Europe for the subject area.

The 2020 Best Global Universities rankings feature 1,500 universities across 81 countries, with Southampton securing 10 subjects in the world’s top 100 to achieve a 94th place overall.

In two of the rankings’ key indicators, physics at Southampton was ranked 50th for its global research reputation and 45th for its staff’s total citations.

Professor Mark Sullivan, Head of Physics and Astronomy, said: “We're very pleased with this result. We study the fundamental nature of the Universe, from the largest scales of galaxies and the solar system, to the smallest scales of the subatomic world – and anything in between. This ranking reflects the excellent, innovative nature of this work, and is a credit to our all academic and technical staff who carry out and support our research.”

Physics is one of five subject areas within the University’s Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences to have achieved top 100 rankings in the global guide.

Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), Computer Science and Engineering (comprising Aerospace, Civil, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering) were placed 44th, 52nd, 91st and joint 95th respectively.

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of Faculty, Engineering and Physical Sciences, said: “I’m very pleased to see five Faculty subject areas featuring in the top 100 of Best Global Universities rankings, reflecting the excellent standard set by our Schools across research, education and enterprise and the opportunity we now have to capitalise on this success.”

Researchers across Europe will apply big data techniques to astrophysical research in a new Innovative Training Network (ITN) coordinated by the University of Southampton.

Big Data Applications for Black Hole Evolution Studies (BID4BEST) will explore a mysterious connection between black holes and their host galaxies through €3.5 million funding from the European Union.

The doctoral training network, led by Principal Investigator Dr Francesco Shankar from the School of Physics and Astronomy, is aiming to prepare a core group of young scientists for observational data from future space missions with strong European involvement.

BID4BEST ITN will launch in March 2020 and incorporate 20 international project partners across four years of research.

“Supermassive black holes exist at the centre of nearly all local galaxies and their masses seem to be correlated with those of their galactic hosts,” Francesco explains. “This link is astonishing given the widely different scales - it is like comparing a single grape to the size of the earth.

“BID4BEST will allow for a massive step toward the solving of this mystery by making use of the latest mission data, analysed with cutting-edge Bayesian and Deep-learning techniques. The massive synergy between academia and industry will allow us, via the employment of 13 first-class Marie Cure PhD fellows, to strengthen our future research impact.”

The quality and volume of incoming space data is predicted to yield transformational science on the formation of black holes in the coming years. BID4BEST will bring together leading scientists in observational and theoretical studies of black holes and galaxies, industrial experts in cutting-edge big-data technologies, and professionals in science dissemination.

“Each of our doctoral research projects will combine state-of-the-art observations, numerical simulations and innovative analytic tools to compare theory with observation and shed light on the physics of black hole formation in the context of galaxy evolution,” Francesco says.

“The training on expertise from different research areas and sectors will be achieved by carefully designed secondments, mixed doctoral supervisory committees, well-coordinated events for team communication and interaction, as well as network-wide courses on astrophysics and transferable skills.”

Academic partners in the research network include some of Europe’s most prestigious universities, with EU contributions benefiting 10 institutions across the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands. Industrial partners range from the start-ups, to medium and large companies such as chemicals giant BASF.

An astronomy team led by the University of Southampton has used the latest imaging technologies to reveal a violent flaring at the heart of a black hole system.

The international study has produced a high frame-rate movie showing fast flickers of radiation emissions equivalent to the output of more than hundred Suns.

Researchers have published their findings in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Co-author Dr Poshak Gandhi, of the School of Physics and Astronomy, believes the discovery could demonstrate a “unifying characteristic” of growing black holes.

The radiation was detected in visible light by the HiPERCAM instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias and in X-rays by NASA's NICER observatory aboard the International Space Station.

Read the full story on the main news page.

An international research team including physicists from the University of Southampton has demonstrated the world’s first ultrafast all-optical room temperature transistor, paving the way for on-chip circuitry with ultrafast logic operability.

The all-optical transistor exploits the material properties of an organic semi-conducting polymer by using an engineered micro cavity where an incoming optical signal can be switched on, off or amplified using a second laser beam.

The international research collaboration led by Professor Pavlos Lagoudakis, which involves the IBM Research Labs in Zurich, the University of Southampton and Skoltech, has been featured on the front cover of the peer-reviewed journal Nature Photonics.

Dr Anton Zasedatelev, of the School of Physics and Astronomy, explains: “All-optical devices that allow for information processing could enable much faster switching and logical operations. There are a huge variety of different applications for such kind of devices, spanning from classical digital processing of the optical signals in telecoms to routing of flying qubits in quantum optical circuits. But such all-optical devices are very difficult to build and efforts to make all-optical processing units have been around for about 50 years.”

One challenge posed by optical signalling is that photons do not interact with each other in a vacuum. The team applied principles of strong light-matter interaction to the problem to boost the interaction of photons in an organic optical cavity and explored ways of harnessing the highly nonlinear phenomena of exciton-polariton condensation towards all-optical switching and amplification.

“We developed a novel organic semiconductor structure capable of ‘clever mixing’ light and matter and found a strong nonlinear effect associated with polariton condensation based on the unique properties of organic materials to support intense and high energy molecular vibrations,” Anton explains.

The tri-partite research collaboration led to the first operating room-temperature transistor exhibiting an unprecedented 6500-fold optical signal amplification with a device length of just a few micrometres. The innovation also features ultrafast switching in the sub-picosecond range, offering a similar switching speed to some previous all-optical devices with the added advantage that it doesn’t require cryogenic cooling to operate.

Professor Pavlos Lagoudakis comments: “A polariton all-optical transistor presents an interesting platform for all-optical coprocessors. The recent breakthrough in our labs opens new avenues for research and development. A major milestone ahead of us is the realisation of the Universal Polariton Gate that would enable full logic functionality.”

Researchers from the University of Southampton have explored three new techniques that use hovering nanoparticles to test the limits of quantum mechanics.

The experiments, which were part of a major €4.4 million European research programme, generated specialised environments to investigate whether quantum wave functions spontaneously collapse.

Principal Investigator Professor Hendrik Ulbricht and lead researcher Dr Andrea Vinante collaborated with scientists from University College London on the project, which has published its findings in the American Physical Society’s Physical Review A.

“Quantum mechanics is the most successful theory in modern physics, as it describes with incredible accuracy the behaviour of particles, atoms and matter,” Andrea explains. “However, the theory might possibly breakdown when applied to larger systems, as suggested by some theoretical studies.

“To investigate these effects one needs a mechanical system exceptionally isolated from the external world. We are trying to achieve this goal by levitating nano and microparticles in a vacuum at low temperature and studying how to optimise an experiment in this direction.”

Spontaneous wave function collapse has been posed as a possible solution to a puzzle of quantum mechanics where a particle occupying many states is observed as a single state when measured.

According to the model, the collapse motion would cause motion in the particle which could be observed by experiments. This is however profoundly challenging as it is masked by the random motion of atoms in the particle’s environment.

The Southampton experiments are seeking to overcome these limitations by placing the particle in a highly controlled environment, levitating a 200 nanometre-wide ball of silica by using electric fields in a cryogenic vacuum chamber. The research considered using an optical cavity, optical tweezers and a SQUID – a superconducting quantum interference device - to measure the ball’s motion.

Validation of the collapse effect would expand scientists’ understanding of fundamental physics and effect the limits of quantum technologies, however the project concluded that each of the three techniques would need to be further refined to achieve this goal.

These latest experiments were conducted as part of the TEQ programme, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation scheme, which has united experts from eight institutions across the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria and Denmark.