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.

Since passing on the SUPA baton to Alan in May I seem to have been busier than ever, mainly in the area of contributing to international planning for the future of the gravitational wave field but also in helping with the preparation of our collaborative consortium grant application to STFC and spending time - but not enough yet - in the lab with our graduate students, with me being taught how to do experimental research in the computer automated era.

So I am back to my old area of helping to measure mechanical loss, and am learning about how to measure thermal conductivities of bonded silicon elements at cryogenic temperatures, as well as solving wave equations for determining the elastic moduli of thin silicate bonds using ultrasonics.

This lab activity is real fun, at least for me – not sure about how the grad students find it (: .

Introduction 

 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. 

Calling on Scotland’s brightest ideas

Scotland’s leading company creation competition and start up development programme for students, graduates and staff from the country’s universities and research institutes is today (Monday 8 February) launching its 2016 programme – its biggest to date with new partnerships and a new award to attract a wider range of applicants.

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.

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SUPA continues to be proud to support a range of Distinguished and International Visitors and Events. In the last year, we have supported visits by:

Again in 2014/15, we were delighted to be able to offer funding for some of our brightest and best PhD students, Postdocs and Early Career Researchers to visit partner institutions around the world to undertake collaborative research and experiments. Funding was awarded to SUPA by SFC for this programme for the fourth time in 2014/15, and some of the funded visits were:

Christopher Bryce from University of Strathclyde visited Centre de Recherche sur l’Hetero-Expitaxe ses Applications (CNRS –CHREA) in Valbonne, France to work on a project focused on the growth, fabrication and characterisation of advanced GaN-based nanostructures. While there, Christopher had the opportunity to see the operation of the new generation Metal-Oxide Chemical Vapour-Phase Deposition MOCVD reactor from AIXTRON which CNRS-CHREA had just had installed and to work with a number of researchers there.  Christopher was compare the characterisation systems at CNRS-CRHEA with those he uses in his project at Strathclyde, and not only has he developed his understanding of the semiconductor growth process and how the technology of the reactors affects the wafers produced, but is hopeful of opening up new avenues of research between the two institutions.