News

University groups go through an annual cycle of renewal with the arrival of new PhD students. In that sense, it's spring-time in Cambridge now. A couple of days ago we had our traditional welcome curry, well attended by current, past, and new students. We welcome, Urvi, Amber, Meghan, Edward, Oliver, and Shitao, supervised by Suchitra, Sian, Montu …

A happy announcement just came through: Cavendish alumnus John Clarke has won this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for work in superconductivity, jointly with Michel Devoret and John Martinis.John did his PhD work at the Cavendish, supervised by Brian Pippard, in the Low Temperature Physics group, the precursor to QM. His legacy to the Cavendish muse…

Pupils from around the country came to see Physics at Work in the new building 16-18 September, and hundreds of them enjoyed the QM superconductivity exhibit. They enjoyed it so much, they voted it the most popular exhibit of the event (not for the first time). A big thank-you to all the speakers, Mengmeng Long, Hanyi Chen, and Riley Mann, ably ass…

This week has seen several QM members attending the annual Condensed Matter Physics in the City conference at UCL, London. Profs Grosche & Dutton delivered talks on heavy fermion materials and Jahn-Teller distortions, respectively. Final-year PhD student Zheyu Wu (pictured) gave an overview of his recent UTe2 studies Z. Wu et al, Phys. Rev. X15 021…

After many weeks of preparations, today was the day of moving the 2.70m high Big Fridge cryostat. This is the vessel that houses our 20.4T magnet system, which had been moved separately a few days earlier.The new building features great ceiling height in the Cryostat Hall, which is nice, but there is no access route that allows us to move the cryos…

Big things have been happening at the Cavendish this past month: the QM labs are moving into a new building, the Ray Dolby Centre. The new home for our group is only a few hundred metres away, but the move has been painful on every level. A removals company has been doing a lot of the hard lifting, but the bulk of the work - disassembling and packi…

Final-year PhD student Theo Weinberger's monumental efforts in the service of science have been rewarded by a Junior Research Fellowship at Murray Edwards College, starting in October. That's three years of funding and (comparative) independence. Excellent news for the whole group. Congratulations, Theo, we are very glad that you'll be at the Caven…

In rapid succession, Christian de Podesta and Oliver Squire had their PhD vivas this week, having submitted their dissertations in under four years. Christian's viva was on Monday 20 January, with Philipp Niklowitz (external, Royal Holloway) and Montu Saxena (internal) as his examiners. Oliver's viva took place on Wednesday 22 January, with Paul Go…

Congratulations are in order to Max, who had his PhD viva on 17 December - and a big thank you to his examiners: external Tony Carrington (Bristol) and internal Jason Robinson. Max completed a tricky project on quantum oscillation studies in topological semimetals on time and on budget and is now starting a postdoc at LMU Munich in the group of Dim…

PhD applicants for 2024/25 may be interested to learn that we are part of a new Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) for Superconductivity, together with colleagues in Bristol and Oxford. Superconductivity is a multi-disciplinary research theme, which includes engineers, material scientists, as well as experimental, theoretical and computational phys…

QM student Maximilian Daschner buckled down over the summer and produced a nice PhD dissertation, which he managed to submit at the end of September, just before his caring college was going to kick him out of his generous lodgings. Max took the path less traveled by: while most of the group are working on unconventional superconductors, his disser…

QM student Christian de Podesta successfully submitted his PhD dissertation at the end of August, after a sprint to meet an aspirational deadline. Christian's dissertation 'Magnetism in Cerium Diantimonides under Pressure' nicely complements the work submitted by Oliver the day before. These two projects produced a step advance in our understanding…

Just within the self-inflicted deadline, QM PhD student Oliver Squire submitted his evocatively titled thesis 'High-Pressure Studies of Some Heavy Fermion Materials'. Oliver is moving on immediately to a job at the Canadian quantum technology company Photonic. Congratulations! 

Last summer's research trip to the Synergetic Extreme Condition User Facility (SECUF), Beijing, by QM members Zheyu Wu, Theo Weinberger & Alex Eaton has been featured in a recent Nature news article. The trio were the first international user group to be awarded measurement time on a new world-unique all-superconducting hybrid magnet system pioneer…

Thomas Gruner and colleagues in the QM group and at the MPI-CPfS in Dresden showed that YbNi2Sn retains high spin entropy down to very low temperatures, much less than 1K, despite being a good metal. On the face of it, this is unexpected, because electrons in metals form a degenerate Fermi gas, and so their entropy decreases linearly with temperatu…