Catching sunbeams
Focussing sunlight with tiny particles could improve the sustainability of the world’s most energy-hungry reactions. Making the chemicals that we need for industries like farming and pharmaceuticals uses nearly 5% of the world’s energy, and most of it comes from fossil fuels that emit CO2 when they’re used. Many of these processes already use catalysts, […]
Capturing the Energy of Individual Electrons
Capturing the Energy of Individual Electrons Being able to control and measure electrons is a vital part of the modern world; it’s the basis of electronics after all. However, electrons also play an incredibly important part in measuring the world around us. By firing electrons at an object or capturing the electrons that escape […]
Trapping light to open up our universe
Down on Earth, solar cells continue growing in the renewable energy sector. Up in space, solar cells are widely used to power satellites and other spacecraft. As we move towards a greener future and as space technologies keep growing, new solar cell designs are being studied to make them better and more efficient at generating […]
What if you could see magnetism?
Magnetism is all around us. Medical imaging inside the body, creating clean electricity with turbines, storing data on computers – all of these things use magnetism at their core to function. However, it can be difficult to improve these processes, and a large reason for that difficulty is the fact that magnetism is ‘invisible’, but […]
A new way for brain cancer treatment
While advances in cancer therapy in recent years have improved the prognosis of many forms of brain cancer, there are still types of brain tumours where conventional therapy is not successful. Traditionally, there are three ways to treat a brain tumour: The (partial) removal of the tumour by a surgeon, the destruction of tumour tissue […]
Controlling the uncontrollable
Humans have long sought to create organised shapes and patterns, sometimes for specific purposes and sometimes just in search of something beautiful. Imagine the beginnings of the perfect garden, how could we guide its growth to fit our plans? We would need to seed plants in regimented rows, build trellising to direct chaotic plants and […]
Navigating hyper-dimensional voltage space
Navigating hyper-dimensional voltage space My research involves developing an algorithm to automatically tune a 2xN array of quantum dots (QDs) that could be used as the building block for a fault tolerant quantum computer. Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionise our daily lives, just like the transistor has changed the last 70 years […]
Watching what happens inside working batteries
We all know what it’s like to have your phone or laptop run out of power too quickly. And we would all be keen to see improved batteries, that can keep going longer and recharge faster! It’s not just our devices that would benefit from better batteries. Electric vehicles are a more renewable and eco-friendly […]
Smart surfaces for heating and cooling buildings using only sunlight
One of the biggest consumers of energy (up to 25% in the UK) is heating and cooling buildings. Instead, what if we could cover walls in surfaces that use only energy from the sun to directly heat and cool the building? This requires clever design of the surface as it needs to switch between heating […]
Solar cells through the Looking Glass of electrons
It’s fascinating to see how dynamic solar cells can be on the micro and nanoscale, especially if you excite them with light or current! In my research, I use a very special family of microscopes called electron microscopes (SEMs, TEMs) which use electrons to see, instead of light. This allows us to see deep down […]