Research Newsletter
Welcome to the December Research newsletter from Strathclyde University's Department of Physics. This issue reports a number of significant research grant awards along with several other items of news. It comes with best wishes for a very enjoyable Christmas and a prosperous New Year.
Contents: Researchers visit House of Commons
New Basic Technology award to develop laser driven particle and radiation sources
Proton acceleration using the World's largest laser
SUPA newsletter announces new £4M award for Strathclyde researchers
Rare earth doped III-Nitride review and DFTB code release
First prize in CCLRC competition for Department student
Semiconductor company sues over Christmas tree lights
[RWM]
Researchers visit House of Commons
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SET for Britain, an organisation that supports and promotes Britain's younger scientists and engineers, hosted a reception in the House of Commons on the 28th of November 2006, sponsored by Ed Vaizey, MP for Wantage, Oxfordshire. Patron for the reception was Professor Sir Arnold Wolfendale FRS. The objective of the meeting was to engender increased dialogue and engagement between MPs, early-stage researchers and Britain's research communities. Young physicists from all over the country applied for entries to present their research and compete for the prestigious Ogden Prize (£ 5000) and the Cavendish Medal, as well as runner-up prizes of £1000 and £500. Participants were also encouraged to contact their own MPs to maximize the turnout of politicians. From Strathclyde, Dr. Albert Reitsma and Ms. Sandra McConville were selected to present a poster. Albert made an overview poster of novel accelerators and radiation sources based on laser-plasma interaction (which is the main theme of the TOPS Alpha-X work [1]), while Sandra presented her work on a new maser radiation mechanism for astrophysics and laboratory microwave devices. The reception was succesful, with 90 poster presentations in two 1½ hour shifts and around 50 MPs visiting the meeting. There was a good "buzz" most of the time and the poster judges had a hard time choosing the best contributions.
[1] http://phys.strath.ac.uk/alpha-x/
[AR]
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| Albert lives in the constituency of the Rt Hon Michael J. Martin MP, speaker of the House of Commons, who received Albert in his office before the meeting. |
New Basic Technology award to develop laser-driven particle and radiation sources
The department's laser-plasma group are members of a consortium of scientists and clinicians from eight UK institutions who have recently secured a Basic Technology grant, the details of which are currently being finalised. The project will concentrate on developing high power laser-based sources of protons, heavier ions and gamma rays, and aims to provide compact and flexible sources with optimal properties for use in industrial and medical context. The joint Strathclyde-Paisley SUPA contribution is led by Dr. Paul McKenna and the team includes Dr. Wilfried Galster, Professor Ken Ledingham, Professor Dino Jaroszynski and Dr. Klaus Spohr ( Paisley ). The other partners are Queens University Belfast, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Imperial College London, Surrey University Ion Beam Centre, University Hospital Birmingham and Southampton University.
[PMcK]
Proton acceleration using the World's most powerful laser
| The possibility of using high power lasers to generate high-quality beams of energetic, multi-MeV, ions is attracting large global interest. The prospect of using laser-accelerated protons in medicine, including oncology, attracts particular interest, since these schemes may lead to compact and relatively low-cost sources , affordable for major hospitals . Among the challenges remaining before these sources can be used in medicine is to increase the numbers and energies of the ions accelerated.
In a recent study, published in Nature Physics ( published online: 10 December 2006 ), Paul McKenna and co-workers use the presently most powerful laser in the world, the Vulcan Petawatt laser at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, to extend the energy and intensity range over which proton scaling is experimentally investigated. These are extended by an order of magnitude, compared to previous studies, up to 400 J and 6 x 10 20 Wcm -2 respectively . The results provide important new understanding of the scaling of proton acceleration in this ultraintense laser pulse regime and are an important step towards potential medic al applications of laser-driven proton sources.
The figure (right) shows proton energy scaling with laser intensity. Inset shows plasma formation in the interaction of a high power laser pulse with a metallic foil target. [PMcK] |
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SUPA newsletter announces further £4M for Strathclyde researchers
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The new SUPA newsletter can be viewed at http://www.supa.ac.uk/news/SUPA_newsletter/.
This issue includes a short article describing the award of a further £4M from EPSRC to Prof. Dino Jaroszynski and co-workers for work on harnessing laser-driven plasma waves.
The newsletter also includes details of the latest round of SUPA prize studentships - closing date 31 Jan. [RWM] |
First prize in CCLRC competition for Department student
David Carroll from the laser-plasma group has won first prize in the student presentation competition at this years CCLRC's High Power Laser Science meeting, held on 18th and 19th December. David's research presentation was titled "Proton beam manipulation by resistive confinement of electrons". The prize is sponsored by the IoP's "Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion" journal, and will be announced in a future edition of the journal.
[PMcK]
Review on Rare-earth doped III-nitrides & release of density functional tight-binding code
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For those behind with their Christmas shopping (sorry, Ben!) the density
functional tight-binding code from Bremen (ne Paderborn) for which the Department's Dr. Ben Hourahine is a
co-developer for just hit the 1.0 release: http://www.dftb-plus.info/
In addition I'm pleased to draw attention to a recently published authorative review by Ben and Prof. Kevin O'Donnell on Rare earth doped III-nitrides for optoelectronic applications : O'Donnell and Hourahine, Eur. Phys. J. Appl. Phys. 36 p91-103 (2006) [BH / RWM]
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Semiconductor company sue over Christmas tree lights
Having worked with GaN-based LEDS and spoken many times of their potential to revolutionise lighting, printing, optical storage and make a significant contribution to energy saving, it has been quite depressing to witness that their main impact appears to be in advanced Christmas lights ....... in particular in making my neighbours' Christmas tree light up their living room in a vibrant shade of blue. Now I learn that the company that has pioneered the blue LEDs and lasers is joining in with my Christmas spirit and is currently trying to sue Argos over a set of tree lights. The story and image comes from Compound Semiconductor magazine and more details can be found on http://compoundsemiconductor.net/articles/news/10/12/15/1
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The Research Newsletter is published at (approximately) six week intervals. It covers research news stories emerging
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