The annual Physics Department Awards for Excellence took place at 2pm on Tuesday 14 September. Held virtually on Zoom this year, there were a series of science talks aimed at all members of the department, followed by the presentation of awards. The awards recognise staff who carry out exceptional work, and go that extra mile.

We are excited to announce a new collaboration in the field of quantum computing! Working with Dunnhumby, a global leader in customer data science, this project will fund a postgraduate student to work with Dr Nicholas Chancellor within the Quantum, Light & Matter (QLM) group to explore the potential of nascent quantum technology in solving hard real-world data-science problems.

Researchers in our Physics Department will receive funding for the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Fusion Power from the UK’s biggest-ever investment in engineering and physical sciences doctoral skills.

Durham is a hub for research excellence and our academics prove that year in and year out through their ground-breaking research. We are delighted that Dr Sownak Bose, from the Department of Physics, has been awarded the Future Leaders Fellowship for his research project into Fundamental Cosmology.

Two Postgraduate students in the Condensed Matter Physics research group, Max Birch and Luke Turnbull, were recently were awarded postgraduate prizes by the Departmental Postgraduate Committee.

Our astronomers are part of an international team that has taken another step towards solving the puzzle of what dark matter might be made of.

You might not think that studying the universe could benefit research into serious illnesses like cancer, but Durham’s astronomers have joined forces with cancer researchers to improve the diagnosis and treatment of patients.

A team led by Prof. Frank Krauss and including Prof. Richard Bower and 8 of our Ph.D. students from the Centre for Doctoral Training in Data-Intensive Science (CDT) have created a simulation in the form of an agent-based model, which describes the spread of an epidemic such as COVID-19 through a virtual population.

Our cosmologists have found an answer to why spiral galaxies like our Milky Way are largely missing from part of our Local Universe called the Supergalactic Plane.

Many possible spintronic applications of skyrmions involve their motion along pre-determined race tracks. Skyrmions can be moved with much lower energy than ferromagnetic domain walls, but there is a problem. Among the many unusual properties of skyrmions is the tendency of their direction of motion to deviate from that of a driving force; the angle by which they diverge is known as the skyrmion Hall angle and is a result of the topology giving rise to a Magnus force in its equation of motion.

Dr Jurgen Schmoll, Astronomer and Instrument Scientist within CfAI and the Department of Physics here at Durham, has captured superb images and timelapse video of today's partial solar eclipse.

A team of astronomers, led by Dr James Nightingale from our Department of Physics, has discovered one of the biggest black holes ever found by taking advantage of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.