Dr Araceli Venegas-Gomez was inspired to become a quantum physics researcher after working in industry, and is now looking to inspire others.

Dr Araceli Venegas-Gomez spent several years working for Airbus in Germany as an aerospace engineer, before falling in love with quantum mechanics. She decided to follow her passion and moved to Scotland to pursue a PhD in quantum physics at the University of Strathclyde.

Following discussions with different quantum stakeholders over the last few years, Venegas-Gomez identified the need to bridge the gap between businesses and academia, and raise awareness of quantum research among the general public.

She was awarded an Optical Society fellowship engaged in international outreach in order to become a global ambassador advocating quantum technologies. To create a link between the different stakeholders in the quantum community and generate global opportunities with quantum technologies, she founded her own company called Qureca.

Qureca offers professional services, business development and an online platform for training and recruitment within quantum technologies. It is part of the EU Quantum Flagship programme, which was launched in 2018 to kick-start a competitive European industry in quantum technologies.

I hope I can support in the development of the skills necessary for the future quantum workforce ARACELI VENEGAS-GOMEZ

While working in industry I always wanted to learn more about physics, so I enrolled in a distance-learning medical physics postgraduate programme. When I was learning more about magnetic resonance imaging, I started to research articles about quantum physics and became really interested in the topic.

I then did some online courses and took annual leave from my work to attend conferences. It was clear to me that I wanted to go in that direction.

It was not until I bought a book called Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow that I asked myself what I wanted to do with my life, and I knew my next goal in life was to do a PhD in quantum physics.

My PhD was in quantum simulation in Prof Andrew Daleys group, Quantum Optics and Many-body Physics.

I worked on dynamics in many-body quantum systems with different ranges of interactions, where we investigated quantum magnetism with spin models.

It helps understand fundamental questions in the study of out-of-equilibrium dynamics of many-body systems.

These theoretical studies can be directly applied in cold-atom experiments and could open up new ways to engineer magnetism at the quantum level for new systems and future materials.

Coming from a different background, it was always hard to feel fully integrated, and still now I consider I have to learn a lot to be able to feel confident in any scientific conversation.

It is important to understand that science and research is a marathon and not a sprint. This can be applied to any area of research.

With my company, I hope I can support in the development of the skills necessary for the future quantum workforce.

I had the pleasure to meet William D Phillips [winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997] several times, and his approach to students, the way he participates in any event with such an eagerness to learn and how much he enjoys teaching difficult concepts in physics to the general public is admirable.

Are you a researcher with an interesting project to share? Let us know by emailing editorial@siliconrepublic.com with the subject line Science Uncovered.

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This researcher is getting others ready for a quantum world - Siliconrepublic.com

People thought what we did was totally wacky, recalls Thomas Ebbesen from the University of Strasbourg in France. When we tried to submit [our 2012 Angewandte Chemie] paper,1 there was one referee report that was very short and simply said: This is not science, this is science fiction.

For many, Ebbesens study might indeed sound like make-believe. His team showed it could change the rate and yield of a photoisomerisation reaction by instead of carrying it out in a beaker putting it in a small space between two mirrors. The space contained no chemical catalyst, nothing obvious that might make this possible. What the researchers did is tap into the power of the vacuum field, a weird quantum mechanical soup that surrounds everything.

2012 was an eye-opener for everyone, says Felipe Herrera who leads a molecular quantum technology group at the University of Santiago, Chile. Nobody believed this, and people spent maybe two or three years until they could reproduce the results.

Although vacuum-field catalysis is still in its infancy and doesnt have any practical applications yet, it could bring catalyst-free catalysis, ultra-selective carbon dioxide reduction and new photosensitisers. It might become a powerful tool to steer chemical reactions akin to photocatalysis. I think this field is going to have far-reaching implications, says Herrera.

It is the view of modern physics that there is no such thing as truly empty space, wrote physicist Brian Skinner from Ohio State University, US, on his blog over a decade ago. Physicists discovered that the universe is filled with an energetic soup, boiling and bubbling with particles that appear as fast as they disappear. Although this almost sounds like a ridiculous return to the long-discarded aether theory, experimental results like the Casimir effect have long since established the vacuum fields existence.

But what has been firmly in the realm of physics is now starting to interest chemists, who hope to one day catalyse reactions with this vacuum field. They do this by creating polaritons, hybrid particles that are part light, part matter. They form even in the absence of light when molecules strongly interact with the so-called virtual photons spontaneously thrown up by the vacuum field.

Creating polaritons out of light and matter is not unlike creating a molecule out of two atoms, Herrera explains. Bring two atoms close enough together and they form a molecule, a new entity with new orbitals, and new chemical properties. Similarly, polaritons often have dramatically different reactivities to their parent molecules so dramatic in fact that they could be likened to a new state of matter.

Although a small field, it has seen an uptick in attention from the scientific community. According to Web of Science, the number of studies containing the keyword molecular polariton has doubled, rising from less than 25 in 2017 to more than 50 in 2019. Since the start of the Covid-19 lockdown, around 200 scientists have been attending weekly webinars on polariton chemistry hosted by researchers at the University of California San Diego, US.

I think this field will open many minds, especially among experimental chemistry colleagues, says Herrera. Thats why I like this field so much, because its a bridge between maybe 50 or 60 years of quantum optics and perhaps 100 years of physical chemistry.

Making molecules interact with the vacuum field is as easy as putting them in a cavity. Simply put, optical cavities consist of two mirrors facing each other and separated by only a few nanometres in some cases. Cavities are a major component of lasers where they form a resonator for light waves. But in the dark, they can be used to create polaritons. Free space is infinite and vacuum field fluctuations are very tiny, which is why we dont see strong coupling in free space, Herrera explains. If you confine the field into tiny spaces, then these vacuum fluctuations are very large.

The dream would be to have super selective chemical protocols using cavities

Joel Yuen-Zhou,University of California San Diego

The cavitys size dictates the wavelength of the virtual photons that can live inside it. Matching this wavelength to be resonant with a molecules bond vibration or an electronic transition creates the conditions for lightmatter mixing, forming molecular polaritons.

An experiment to create polaritonic states might seem surprisingly crude: silver-coated glass slides serve as mirrors sandwiching a layer of target molecules. The setup is held together with screws, so the cavitys resonance frequency can be fine-tuned by minutely changing the mirror-to-mirror distance with a screwdriver.

Before 2012, physicists had modified molecules optical properties like light emission rates in this way. But Ebbesens team showed for the first time that sticking molecules inside a cavity can also alter their chemical properties. It was a proof of concept, and other studies conducted since hinted at the tantalising prospect of controlling chemistry in an entirely new way. It was revolutionary, certainly challenging how we think about chemical reactions, says Wei Xiong who works on ultrafast spectroscopy at the University of California San Diego in the US.

Although synthetic chemists might not see cavity catalysts in the catalogues of their favourite chemicals suppliers anytime soon, there has been progress in the field. In a preprint published in 2018, a team around Hidefumi Hiura from Japans NEC Corporation reported a 10,000-fold increase in the rate of ammonia borane hydrolysis when it was put inside a cavity containing water polaritons.2 Last year, the groups of Ebbesen and Strasbourg colleague Joseph Moran showed how coupling to the vacuum field changes the product ratio in a reaction that can produce two different products.3 And earlier this year, scientists led by Kenji Hirai and Hiroshi Ujii from Hokkaido University, Japan, tuned a cavity to the carbonyl stretching motion of ketones and aldehydes, slowing down the rate of a Prins cyclisation by up to 70%.4

People who learn quantum electrodynamics dont often sit in advanced organic chemistry classes and vice versa

Prineha Narang, Harvard University

How far could we push these changes? wonders computational materials scientist Prineha Narang from Harvard University, US. Could we have something that is completely selective to one product and shuts off all the other products, in particular for reactions that are of technological relevance? Carbon dioxide reduction would be one of those reactions, she adds.

While polaritonic chemistry might not become the next big thing for industrial synthesis, flow setups that funnel reagents through a cavity could provide a solution to scaling up reactions. I think it would be very nice to see controlling chemistry of triplet states, suggest Herrera. There are many photosensitisers that are used in industry that rely on electrons becoming unpaired.

The dream would be to have super selective chemical protocols using cavities, says Joel Yuen-Zhou who works on polariton chemistry at the University of California San Diego, US. This is still under development, but it might be the case that with appropriate photonic architectures, this will be possible.

However, so far, researchers havent been able to show that vacuum-field catalysis can do reactions that are impossible or hard to do with other types of chemistry. This is what we would love to demonstrate, says Ebbesen. But for the moment, were trying to understand the underlying mechanism of why some reactions are enhanced and some reactions are slowed down.

For the most part, scientists still dont understand the microscopic mechanism underlying vacuum-field catalysis. When molecules sit inside a cavity, only a small fraction less than 1% are actually occupying polaritonic states. The rest are in dark states, which can be likened to non-bonding orbitals. How exactly macroscopic changes happen with most molecules remaining dark is still a mystery.

Sometimes the evidence is confusing or contradictory, says Herrera. The mechanism that colleagues conclude in one paper doesnt work for a very similar molecule in another paper. Initially, researchers tried to reason that polaritons unpredictable behaviour was due to energetic variations like changes in reaction barrier.

However, first theoretical5 and then experimental6 evidence like the fact that like polar bonds are more strongly influenced than non-polar ones now point to vibrational symmetry as the key to solving the dark state paradox. Vibrational modes can be naturally self-excited or de-excited by the vacuum field depending on their dipolar symmetry, explains Herrera though how this links to reaction rate changes remains unclear.

A model that reproduces let alone predicts how different compounds behave is still missing. What scientists are after is a set of rules not unlike the WoodwardHoffman rules: something simple that nevertheless reflects the complexity of the underlying quantum mechanics.

Most reactions studied so far are slowed down by cavities rather than accelerated not something chemists usually look for in a catalyst. But why this happens and how they can be speeded up remain open questions, says Xiong. Only if we can understand what knobs we need to turn, we can control the selectivity, he adds.

Still, the prospect of doing reactions by simply putting reagents between two mirrors remains intriguing. Whether this is going to be a universal tool or not I think, as of now, I would say no but I wouldnt discard it in the future, says Yuen-Zhou. Just like with photoredox catalysis, you just need to find the right class of reactions.

There might certainly be something said for more people becoming involved and working together within this field. People who learn quantum electrodynamics dont often sit in advanced organic chemistry classes and vice versa theres a gap to be bridged, Narang says. But of course thats also where a lot of exciting discoveries come from.

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Hybrid lightmatter particles offer tantalising new way to control chemistry - Chemistry World

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Perhaps not, some say.And if someone is there to hear it? If you think that means it obviously did make a sound, you might need to revise that opinion.We have found a new paradox in quantum mechanics one of our two most fundamental scientific theories, together with Einstein's theory of relativity that throws doubt on some common-sense ideas about physical reality.

Take a look at these three statements:

These are all intuitive ideas, and widely believed even by physicists. But our research, published in Nature Physics, shows they cannot all be true or quantum mechanics itself must break down at some level.

This is the strongest result yet in a long series of discoveries in quantum mechanics that have upended our ideas about reality. To understand why it's so important, let's look at this history.

Quantum mechanics works extremely well to describe the behavior of tiny objects, such as atoms or particles of light (photons). But that behavior is very odd.

In many cases, quantum theory doesn't give definite answers to questions such as "where is this particle right now?" Instead, it only provides probabilities for where the particle might be found when it is observed.

For Niels Bohr, one of the founders of the theory a century ago, that's not because we lack information, but because physical properties like "position" don't actually exist until they are measured.

And what's more, because some properties of a particle can't be perfectly observed simultaneously such as position and velocity they can't be real simultaneously.

No less a figure than Albert Einstein found this idea untenable. In a 1935 article with fellow theorists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he argued there must be more to reality than what quantum mechanics could describe.

Read more: Einstein vs quantum mechanics ... and why he'd be a convert today

The article considered a pair of distant particles in a special state now known as an "entangled" state. When the same property (say, position or velocity) is measured on both entangled particles, the result will be random but there will be a correlation between the results from each particle.

For example, an observer measuring the position of the first particle could perfectly predict the result of measuring the position of the distant one, without even touching it. Or the observer could choose to predict the velocity instead. This had a natural explanation, they argued, if both properties existed before being measured, contrary to Bohr's interpretation.

However, in 1964 Northern Irish physicist John Bell found Einstein's argument broke down if you carried out a more complicated combination of different measurements on the two particles.

Bell showed that if the two observers randomly and independently choose between measuring one or another property of their particles, like position or velocity, the average results cannot be explained in any theory where both position and velocity were pre-existing local properties.

That sounds incredible, but experiments have now conclusively demonstrated Bell's correlations do occur. For many physicists, this is evidence that Bohr was right: physical properties don't exist until they are measured.

But that raises the crucial question: what is so special about a "measurement"?

In 1961, the Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner devised a thought experiment to show what's so tricky about the idea of measurement.

He considered a situation in which his friend goes into a tightly sealed lab and performs a measurement on a quantum particle its position, say.

However, Wigner noticed that if he applied the equations of quantum mechanics to describe this situation from the outside, the result was quite different. Instead of the friend's measurement making the particle's position real, from Wigner's perspective the friend becomes entangled with the particle and infected with the uncertainty that surrounds it.

This is similar to Schrdinger's famous cat, a thought experiment in which the fate of a cat in a box becomes entangled with a random quantum event.

Read more: Schrdinger's cat gets a reality check

For Wigner, this was an absurd conclusion. Instead, he believed that once the consciousness of an observer becomes involved, the entanglement would "collapse" to make the friend's observation definite.

But what if Wigner was wrong?

In our research, we built on an extended version of the Wigner's friend paradox, first proposed by aslav Brukner of the University of Vienna. In this scenario, there are two physicists call them Alice and Bob each with their own friends (Charlie and Debbie) in two distant labs.

There's another twist: Charlie and Debbie are now measuring a pair of entangled particles, like in the Bell experiments.

As in Wigner's argument, the equations of quantum mechanics tell us Charlie and Debbie should become entangled with their observed particles. But because those particles were already entangled with each other, Charlie and Debbie themselves should become entangled in theory.

But what does that imply experimentally?

Read more: Quantum physics: our study suggests objective reality doesn't exist

Our experiment goes like this: the friends enter their labs and measure their particles. Some time later, Alice and Bob each flip a coin. If it's heads, they open the door and ask their friend what they saw. If it's tails, they perform a different measurement.

This different measurement always gives a positive outcome for Alice if Charlie is entangled with his observed particle in the way calculated by Wigner. Likewise for Bob and Debbie.

In any realisation of this measurement, however, any record of their friend's observation inside the lab is blocked from reaching the external world. Charlie or Debbie will not remember having seen anything inside the lab, as if waking up from total anaesthesia.

But did it really happen, even if they don't remember it?

If the three intuitive ideas at the beginning of this article are correct, each friend saw a real and unique outcome for their measurement inside the lab, independent of whether or not Alice or Bob later decided to open their door. Also, what Alice and Charlie see should not depend on how Bob's distant coin lands, and vice versa.

We showed that if this were the case, there would be limits to the correlations Alice and Bob could expect to see between their results. We also showed that quantum mechanics predicts Alice and Bob will see correlations that go beyond those limits.

Next, we did an experiment to confirm the quantum mechanical predictions using pairs of entangled photons. The role of each friend's measurement was played by one of two paths each photon may take in the setup, depending on a property of the photon called "polarisation". That is, the path "measures" the polarisation.

Our experiment is only really a proof of principle, since the "friends" are very small and simple. But it opens the question whether the same results would hold with more complex observers.

We may never be able to do this experiment with real humans. But we argue that it may one day be possible to create a conclusive demonstration if the "friend" is a human-level artificial intelligence running in a massive quantum computer.

Although a conclusive test may be decades away, if the quantum mechanical predictions continue to hold, this has strong implications for our understanding of reality even more so than the Bell correlations. For one, the correlations we discovered cannot be explained just by saying that physical properties don't exist until they are measured.

Now the absolute reality of measurement outcomes themselves is called into question.

Our results force physicists to deal with the measurement problem head on: either our experiment doesn't scale up, and quantum mechanics gives way to a so-called "objective collapse theory", or one of our three common-sense assumptions must be rejected.

Read more: The universe really is weird: a landmark quantum experiment has finally proved it so

There are theories, like de Broglie-Bohm, that postulate "action at a distance", in which actions can have instantaneous effects elsewhere in the universe. However, this is in direct conflict with Einstein's theory of relativity.

Some search for a theory that rejects freedom of choice, but they either require backwards causality, or a seemingly conspiratorial form of fatalism called "superdeterminism".

Another way to resolve the conflict could be to make Einstein's theory even more relative. For Einstein, different observers could disagree about when or where something happens but what happens was an absolute fact.

However, in some interpretations, such as relational quantum mechanics, QBism, or the many-worlds interpretation, events themselves may occur only relative to one or more observers. A fallen tree observed by one may not be a fact for everyone else.

All of this does not imply that you can choose your own reality. Firstly, you can choose what questions you ask, but the answers are given by the world. And even in a relational world, when two observers communicate, their realities are entangled. In this way a shared reality can emerge.

Which means that if we both witness the same tree falling and you say you can't hear it, you might just need a hearing aid.

This article was originally published atThe Conversation.The publication contributed the article to Live Science'sExpert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Originally posted here:

New quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question - Space.com

God does not play dice with the world, Albert Einstein famously declared, to which Benjamn Labatut would surely retort: perhaps not but the devil does. In fact, Einstein himself had a lifelong niggle of doubt about mathematics, the discipline that we suppose keeps the Lord away from the gaming tables. How is it, he wondered, that an intellectual tool invented by humans can comprehend, account for and even manipulate so much of objective reality? That the physical world should be amenable to something we made up seemed to him suspect.

Is it perhaps that we register only as much of the world as our figurings can encompass? Wittgenstein had already conjectured that the limits of our language are the limits of our knowledge; could this be the case also, but more radically, with mathematics and the branches of science on which it is based? We see only that which we are capable of seeing: how much is beyond us?

About quantum mechanics, the development of which was as bold and momentous a feat as the formulation of the theory of general relativity, Einstein had more than a doubt he loathed it, refusing to accept a version of physics that replaced Newtonian certitude with a haze of probabilities. He spent the last 30 years of his life attempting to bring about a synthesis that would transcend quantum theory, and failed. Outlandish hypotheses put forward in the late 1920s by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, the originators of the Copenhagen Interpretation of how atoms work, today underpin the science that guides the exploration of the farthest reaches of space and the workings of the mobile phone in your pocket.

Books of popular science usually celebrate the wondrous achievements that applied mathematics has wrought in the realms of physics, chemistry and cosmology. Labatut, born in Holland and resident in Chile, will have none of it. When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West) is his ingenious, intricate and deeply disturbing work of fiction based on real events, though it might have been better to call it a nonfiction novel, since the majority of the characters are historical figures, and much of the narrative is based on historical fact.

Towards the close of the book we are introduced briefly to the narrators neighbour, whom he encounters on his nocturnal strolls with his dog and whom he refers to as the night gardener, because he tends his plants when theyre asleep and wont be distressed by his interfering with them. It is to this mysterious figure that the narrator or Labatut, since the two seem synonymous gives the last, alarming, word. For the gardener, sums are the root of all contemporary evil: It was mathematics not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.

The first section of Labatuts book moves at a dizzying pace. He begins with a guided tour of a chamber of horrors in which we encounter some of the more diabolical inventions prompted by two world wars, and are introduced to a blur of real-life characters including the drug-raddled Hermann Gring, who crushed a cyanide capsule in his mouth to avoid the hangmans rope; the father of computing, Alan Turing, who is reputed to have killed himself by biting into an apple he had injected with the same poison; Johann Jacob Diesbach, the inventor of Prussian blue, the first modern synthetic pigment and the basis of cyanide; and the alchemist Johann Dippel, who may have been the model for Mary Shelleys Frankenstein.

The real villain here, however, is the chemist Fritz Haber (who died in 1934), who directed the programme of poison gas attacks that killed tens of thousands of soldiers in the first world war, an accomplishment that drove his disapproving wife to suicide. Haber also discovered how to harvest nitrogen and make the fertiliser that saved the hundreds of millions of people who would have died in worldwide famines at the beginning of the 20th century. All the same, in the end he was overwhelmed by guilt, not, Labatut writes, for the part he had played in the death of untold human beings yes, the generally fine translation does wobble in places but because his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium of the planet that he feared the worlds future belonged not to mankind but to plants.

After this hair-raising opening we are launched into somewhat more tranquil regions of spacetime, where float more familiar characters such as Einstein and other 20th-century physicists and mathematicians, and the narrative pace slows as the booster rocket that was the first chapter falls away.

One of the most impressive aspects of the book is the wonderfully intricate web of associations that it weaves. The mathematician and soldier Karl Schwarzschild solved the field equations in the theory of general relativity in 1915, the same year Einstein published them. Einstein was astounded to receive his letter containing the solution, and soon replied to it; however, Schwarzschild was already dead, of an obscure disease which was possibly the result of his having been caught in a gas attack in the trenches

One of the consequences of his solution was the Schwarzschild singularity, an early name for the phenomenon we now know as a black hole. From the abyss of war he had written to a friend: We have reached the highest point of civilisation. All that is left for us is to decay and fall.

Next we meet, or are confronted with, two of the greatest mathematicians and strangest human beings of our time. The Japanese Shinichi Mochizuki invented a new kind of mathematics; a fellow theorist said of one of his papers that he felt that it had come from the future. Mochizuki achieved fame in 1996 when he proved a mathematical conjecture by the German-born Alexander Grothendieck. Between 1958 and 1973, Labatut writes, Grothendieck convinced the finest minds of his generation to join his radical quest to unearth the structures underlying all mathematical objects. Mochizuki and Grothendieck were both visionaries, and both ended by renouncing mathematics, the former becoming completely unhinged by the heart of the heart, an entity Grothendieck had discovered at the very centre of mathematics What this entity might be, we are not told; but the narrator considers it a thing best kept firmly locked away in Pandoras laboratory.

The second half of Labatuts book is largely taken up with the struggle for supremacy in modern physics between Erwin Schrdinger and Heisenberg. In 1926 Schrdinger formulated an equation which describes, Labatut writes, virtually the whole of modern chemistry and physics; in violent opposition, Heisenberg developed the uncertainty principle, throwing the whole of modern chemistry and physics into doubt, and in the process invented quantum mechanics. There was a price, as Bohr, that crafty magus, foresaw: in philosophical terms, Bohr told Heisenberg that the uncertainty principle was the end of determinism.

No one fully understands quantum theory, since it makes no sense to our common sense minds; but it works, and is at the foundation of most of the significant advances in modern technology. Like Einstein, Schrdinger couldnt be doing with it, and tried all his life to find ways to transcend it.

Which of them was right, Schrdinger or Heisenberg? Both were, possibly, and possibly both were wrong, also, in a world poised upon quanta. Their scientific heirs continue to search for the ToE, or Theory of Everything, a mathematical formula that will unite all five forces, from gravity down to the ties that bind subatomic particles; it is still the grail for physicists everywhere, but the light of that sacred vessel continues to be a tantalising flicker.

The Spanish title of Labatuts book is Un Verdor Terrible roughly, A Terrible Greening and it is a pity some English version of it was not found. The book closes with the night gardener informing the narrator of the manner in which citrus trees die. At the end they produce a monstrous crop, when their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.

Labatut has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present. Has modern science and its engine, mathematics, in its drive towards the heart of the heart, already assured our destruction? As Grothendieck put it: The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations.

Yes, but mother nature, as we see in these times of pandemic, has her own ways of teaching us humility.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamn Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West, is published by Pushkin (14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamn Labatut review the dark side of science - The Guardian

Are you an ambitious researcher in spintronics looking for your next challenge? Do you want to further your career in one of the UKs leading spintronics research groups?

You will join an experimental research project on quantum spin Hall spintronics, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. You will work in a team at the University of Leeds that is led by Prof. Christopher Marrows (School of Physics and Astronomy), and will collaborate with colleagues led by Prof. Edmund Linfield in the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, as well as our industrial partner, Qinetiq.

You will have an experimental PhD degree, or equivalent, and research experience in Physics and/or Electronic Engineering along with significant experience in the physics of nanomagnetism, semiconductor heterostructures, topological materials, and/or spintronics, ideally in the field of quantum spin Hall materials or related areas.

You will focus on the design and fabrication of semiconductor/ferromagnet heterostructure devices and their measurement by magnetotransport methods. In addition to carrying out a series of research projects, you will be an excellent communicator, responsible for day-to-day interactions with collaborators in both Schools, writing papers, and making presentations. You will sometimes travel to visit project partners and attend conferences in the UK, and overseas, to present your results.

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact:

Christopher Marrows, Professor of Condensed Matter Physics

Tel: +44 (0)113 343 3780 or email:c.h.marrows@leeds.ac.uk

Location:Leeds - Main CampusFaculty/Service:Faculty of Engineering & Physical SciencesSchool/Institute:School of Physics & AstronomyCategory:ResearchGrade:Grade 7Salary:33,797 to 40,322 p.a.Post Type:Full TimeContractType:Fixed Term (Up to 3.5 years (grant funding))ClosingDate:Sunday 11 October 2020Reference:EPSPA1016Downloads:CandidateBrief

Continued here:

Research Fellow in Quantum Spin Hall Spintronics job with UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS | 225312 - Times Higher Education (THE)