Visit by Onofrio Marago

Onofrio Marago (NanoSoft Lab, IPCF-CNR, Messina) is visiting the group this week.  Onofrio has a long-running collaboration with the Optical Tweezers Group and exchange visits between UCL and NanoSoft Lab are presently funded by our Royal Society International Joint Project.

New Group Members

Muhammad Abdul Khudus has joined the group for his MSc project.  Muhammad gained his first degree from Imperial College and will be working on a project on nano-optics.

Nobel Laureate at UCL

2010 Physics Nobel Laureate Prof Andre Geim is giving the annual Bragg Lecture at UCL on Wednesday 27 October.  The Bragg Lecture is the premier lecture in condensed-matter and materials physics at UCL.  It is given annually by a distinguished scientist working in the field.

Graphene: Magic of Flat Carbon

Graphene - single atomic plane pulled out of graphite - is a wonder material. It has many superlatives to its name. It is the thinnest material one can imagine and the strongest one ever measured. Its charge carriers have zero effective mass and can travel micron distances without scattering under ambient conditions. Graphene can sustain current densities million times higher than copper, shows record thermal conductivity and stiffness, is impermeable to gases or liquids. It reconciles such conflicting qualities as brittleness and ductility. Electrons in graphene behave in such a way that this allows the investigation of relativistic quantum phenomena in a bench-top experiment. I will overview fascinating properties of graphene and outline some applications.

Location: Christopher Ingold Chemistry Auditorium, UCL

Time: 4.30pm, Wed 27 Oct

Bubble Ultrasound Group Meeting

The next Bubble Ultrasound Group meeting is being held at Imperial College on Friday 1 October. This is a regular series of meetings that brings together researchers working in microbubble technology and usually consists of a number of short talks on current research with time for discussion on future directions. The programme for the 1 October meeting is:

2:00 Welcome & Introduction

2:05 Jean-Pierre O'Brien

2:35 Mehrdad Azmin

3:05 David Thomas

3:35 John Casey

4:05 Veronique Mahue

4:35 General discussion

New group members

Agata Pawlikowska is joining the group for a PhD.  Agata studied at Wroclaw University of Technology and at Imperial College where she worked on holographic optical traping and gained an MSc in Optics and Photonics.  She is working for a PhD on the UCL/NPL optical and acoustical microbubble trapping project.  

Also, Radhika Patel is returning to the group.  Radhika worked in our lab over the summer as a Nuffield Foundation Bursary Student, and will be spending the rest of the year with us working on her MSci project.

Nanophotonics meets quantum optics and NOIs meeting

This week Susan and Marios have been attending the 'Nanophotonics meets quantum optics' Physics School in Physikzentrum Bad Honnef, Germany, where they also presented a poster on some of our most recent work on nanofibre trapping.

On the last day of the Physics School the annual project meeting of our European project 'Nanofibre Optical Interfaces for Ions, Atoms and Molecules (NOIs)' was held, with progress reports from participants based in Cork, Moscow, London, Innsbruck and Mainz.

Visit to NanoSoft Lab, IPCF-CNR (Messina)

Phil spent the week of 13-18 September visiting Onofrio Marago and colleagues at the NanoSoft Lab, IPCF-CNR (Messina).  The visit was part of our International Joint Project on Photonic Force Microscopy funded by the Royal Society.  Among the highlights of the week was a half-day meeting on graphene with talks by Onofrio, Giuseppe Angilella (Catania) and Prof Norman March (former holder of the Coulson Chair in Theoretical Chemisty, Oxford).