New Lecturers and Fellows in Physics awarded grants totalling £880k from ESPRC and STFC

Tuesday 1 March 2011

This outstanding result represents a 100% success rate for EPSRC First Lecturer grant applications from the department in the last year - with grants awarded to James Adams, Annika Lohstroh and Silvia Pani. Drs Adams and Lohstroh are lecturers recently appointed under the South East Physics (SEPnet) regional physics consortium. In addition Dr Arnau Rios Huget has been awarded a prestigious Advanced Fellowship from STFC to support his work in theoretical nuclear physics.

You can read more about the aims of these research projects below.

“Implementation of a benchtop energy-dispersive X-ray diffraction computed tomography system for in vitro tissue characterisation” 
Dr Silvia Pani - grant value £125k, EPSRC 
The project is aimed at developing a system for characterisation of "in vitro" soft tissue using X-ray diffraction Computed Tomography; this will allow a more reliable lesion classification than methods based on X-ray transmission, allowing discrimination of benign and malignant tumours and cancer staging. The technique will be considerably faster than other X-ray diffraction based techniques thanks to the use of novel pixellated spectroscopic detectors.

“Pulsed laser deposited carbon electrodes for diamond radiation sensors”
Dr Annika Lohstroh - grant value £122k, EPSRC
The next generation of X-ray sensors in synchrotron and medical applications will have to provide better spatial resolution as well as being able to withstand higher beam intensities then current technology. Diamond is a particular promising material for these purposes, but the amount of heaver elements in the sensor and its electric connections should be minimised to optimise the benefit of diamonds unique material properties. In addition, the electrodes need to perform reliably in the high flux environment. The project will investigate the suitability of pulsed laser deposition carbon based coatings as an alternative electrode material to traditional metal layers for diamond based radiation sensors, particularly with respect to X-ray sensing.

“Tack energy and switchable adhesion of liquid crystalline elastomers”
Dr James Adams - grant value £125k, EPSRC
The tack energy is a measure of "tackiness" an adhesive, which quantifies the amount of energy required to separate two objects joined by the adhesive layer. Switchable adhesives whose "tackiness" can be turned on and off in response to a stimulus would be extremely useful, particularly in recycling and assembling products. This project will model the potential of liquid crystalline elastomers as switchable adhesives.

"Time evolution of fermionic systems from first principles"
Dr Arnau Rios Huguet - STFC Advanced Fellowship, grant value £516k
The project is an attempt to provide a more realistic description of nuclear reactions. Using theoretical techniques from the field of nonequilbrium quantum dynamics, the aim is to simulate collisions of isotopes from a microscopic perspective including dissipative effects arising from inelastic many-body processes between the (potentially hundreds) neutrons and protons within each nucleus. Unique numerical techniques and supercomputing resources will be used to predict, from a first principles perspective, the observables associated with the collision of radioactive isotopes. Ultimately, this will lead to a better understanding of the nuclear reactions taking place in the next generation of radioactive ion beam facilities around the world.