The Ultra-low vibration (ULV) labs in St Andrews are the most advanced of its kind in the UK and one of just a handful worldwide. The facility achieves vibration levels which are about two order of magnitude better than the best industry standard. They will allow for atomic scale characterization of the electronic states and magnetic structure in quantum materials. Since opening of the facility in May last year, three bespoke scanning tunnelling microscopes, which were developed by the research group of Dr Wahl, have been installed. The microscopes are operating at very low temperatures down to 7mK and in magnetic fields up to 14T, providing an energy resolution up to 10μeV. For characterization of the materials, a metal tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope is brought within a few atomic radii of a surface and held there with a stability on the order of picometers. It is this stability, which is required over extended periods of time, which necessitates the complex vibration isolation. The research carried out in the facility will aim at understanding unconventional superconductivity in quantum materials. In particular, the group of Dr Peter Wahl has, using these instruments, recently succeeded in imaging the magnetic structure of quantum materials at the atomic scale.

I'm an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow working in galaxy evolution and observational cosmology at the School of Physics and Astronomy in St Andrews. I did my undergraduate and PhD at Edinburgh, after which I moved to Portsmouth as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation for 5.5 years. I moved back to Scotland in March 2014 when I took up my current fellowship in St Andrews.

I remember that as I filled in the application form it became clearer and clearer in my mind that I didn’t have much of a hope in receiving the award. But the format of the application is actually quite useful, and similar to applications for other prizes in that it invites you to review significant achievements to date separately to the more typical research proposal. Aware that practice makes perfect, and frankly desperate for some extra research money, I carried on regardless (with, I remember it well, a sick child on my shoulder the whole time). I was delighted to be shortlisted and that boosted my confidence enormously. The interview day, at the Royal Society in London, was a lot of fun in spite of my initial reservations.

The CM-CDT is a doctoral training partnership between SUPA Condensed Matter physics activities at St Andrews, Heriot-Watt and Edinburgh Universities. The CM-CDT has a threefold purpose: to provide students with a rigorous, broad graduate education across the spectrum of Condensed Matter Physics; to train them in skills that equip them for the workplace, be it industrial or academic; and to foster a vibrant, diverse research environment for their PhD projects.  This endeavor is supported by EPSRC, University, Scottish Funding Council and other funding sources.

 SUPA physicists have had pivotal roles during the first year of operations of the LHC detectors during Run 2, at 13 TeV proton-proton collision centre-of-mass energies. After the discovery of the Higgs boson, the main goals have been to characterise the main Standard Model processes at 13 TeV and to search for phenomena beyond the Standard Model. There was great excitement on 15 December 2015 when ATLAS and CMS presented their preliminary results from the 2015 data taking at a CERN seminar*, in which both experiments observe an unexpected excess in the two-photon resonant channel at around 750 GeV. The ATLAS and CMS results are consistent with a 3.6 sigma and 2.6 sigma excess, respectively (see for example Figure 1). When one looks in a wider mass window (the “look-elsewhere effect”), the global significance of the excess is smaller (2.0 sigma and 1.2 sigma for ATLAS and CMS). While the theoretical community is very excited at the prospects for new physics beyond the Standard Model, the experiments are cautiously suggesting that we should wait for the 2016 results to check whether this is a statistical fluctuation or not. 

In a recent publication in Nature Physics [Gonzalez-Izquierdo et al, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys3613], a team of researchers led by Prof. Paul McKenna have discovered that diffraction of ultra-intense laser light passing through a normally opaque plasma can be used to control charged particle motion. The results have potentially important implications in the development of laser-driven particle accelerators and radiation sources (which rely on controlling the motion of plasma electrons displaced by the intense laser fields) and for the investigation of aspects of laboratory astrophysics.

IllumiNations, the closing event for the International Year of Light in Scotland too place on the 3rd December at Heriot-Watt University. School children and adult visitors attended a range of science exhibits, a lecture by BBC science communicator Professor Jim Al-¬Khalili and a spectacular science-based light show. SUPA shared a stand with the Institute of Physics and displayed information about IYL activities that had taken place in Scotland during year, and information on Scottish physics more widely.

Back in 2014, recognising the importance of the Year of Light to Scottish physics, and the many links to Scotland, SUPA, together  sought to establish a distinct Scottish contribution to the Year’s activities, as well as playing a role in the UK and global programmes. SUPA, together with IOP Scotland and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, made a case to SFC to support a core programme of IYL2015 events in Scotland. SFC’s funding of £50k was more than matched by the SUPA universities, alongside contributions from RSE, M Squared Lasers, the Knowledge Transfer Network, Gas Sensing Solutions and others.