Experimental Physics:

The Experimental Physics group at Swansea University comprises academic staff, postdoctoral officers and postgraduate research students. Its work is supported by grants from EPSRC, the EU, The Royal Society, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and various industrial and government sources.

There are two main fields of research:

 Atomic, Molecular and Laser Physics;

(Mike Charlton, Helmut Telle, Will Bryan, Stefan Eriksson,  Richard Lewis, Niels Madsen and Dirk-Peter van der Werf)

A major focus of our research is low-energy positron and positronium physics, with particular application to the creation of ultra-low energy antihydrogen.  This work is a key element of  the ALPHA experiment based at the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN. ALPHA has created antihydrogen atoms almost at rest by mixing trapped antiprotons from the AD with positrons and has recently succeeded in trapping some of the anti-atoms in a magnetic minimum trap.  Antihydrogen trapping at ALPHA will permit spectroscopic comparison of the atomic properties of matter and antimatter, enabling precision tests of CPT symmetry to an accuracy of 1 part in 10¹⁵. Tests of the weak equivalence principle of general relativity are also anticipated.

The group is also involved in the KATRIN project based at Karlsruhe to bound the neutrino rest mass with unprecedented sensitivity by measuring the end-point of the beta-particle energy spectrum in tritium decay. We have successfully developed an extremely sensitive laser Raman system to continuously monitor the purity of the tritium gas as it is cycled around the apparatus.  

Another major research area is the study of atomic and molecular quantum levels and the dynamics of photon-particle interactions.  This includes: generation and laser probing of positronium  using resonant multiple-photon ionization spectroscopy (RIS); using pulsed nanosecond lasers to make precise determinations of energy levels in atomic and molecular phsyics; using femtosecon laser facilities at RAL to study the dynamics of bound and continuum electronic wavepackets in laser-driven gas-phase atoms.  

Finally, we collaborated with  a group based at Imperial College London in confining and manipulating ultracold neutral atoms in microtraps. This team achieved the first ever Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) on a permanently magnetised atom chip, were the first group in the UK to make a BEC on a silicon atom chip, and were also the the first to show that single atom detection can be achieved using microfabricated optical cavities on silicon atom chips with a scheme which is scalable.  At Swansea we plan to extend the work on the trapped atom interferometer to include atoms belonging to fermionic species, and also by investigating ways to utilise large and dense samples to improve measurement sensitivity e.g. by multiparticle entanglement.

To download more information on PhD research, please click here: Postgraduate Research Projects-June2011.pdf

Nanoscale Physics: (Peter Dunstan and Helmut Telle)  

The fundamental understanding of the electronic, structural, chemical and optical properties of materials on the nanoscale is essential for advances in nanotechnology.  Developments in experimental physics underpin these advances via characterisation and quantification of quantum phenomena which can dominate at these length scales.  Our research centres on two main areas: determining properties of semiconductors, quantum-well devices and quantum dots using nanoscale probe techniques; and the development of imaging and spectrocopic techniques to study biological samples such as chromosomes and bacteria.

Theoretical Physics:  

The Theoretical Physics group has thirteen members of staff, with currently four postdoctoral officers and twelve research students.  It is the fourth largest particle physics theory group in the UK, and is supported mainly by STFC, but also has grants from EPSRC, the EU, Royal Society and Leverhulme Trust.

 There are two main fields of research; 

Quantum Field Theory and Strings:

(Profs. David Dunbar, Tim Hollowood, Carlos Nunez, Graham Shore, Drs. Adi Armoni, Prem Kumar, Asad Naqvi, Warren Perkins and Maurizio Piai)

Our interests focus on fundamental aspects of quantum field theory, string theory and quantum gravity, together with applications in QCD and LHC phenomenology. Over the years, string theory has evolved from its original role as a model of hadrons to be first a candidate unified "theory of everything" and now a powerful, wide-ranging tool for investigating both strong and weak-coupling regimes of quantum field theory and gravity, with particularly interesting applications to QCD both in the large-N_c limit and at non-zero temperature or baryon charge density.  A further programme focusses on the computation of multi-particle scattering amplitudes in gauge theories such as QCD and quantum gravity using a novel toolkit inspired by the recently-conjectured duality between Yang-Mills and topological string theories.  Finally, our phenomenology interests cover both electroweak symmetry breaking, to be probed at LHC, and the role of anomalies in polarised deep inelastic scattering.

Lattice Field Theory:

(Profs. Simon Hands, Gert Aarts, Chris Allton and Biagio Lucini)  

Our research uses direct estimation of the quantum path integral, principally by using high performance computers (HPC), to make systematically-improveable predictions in strongly-interacting quantum field theory, of which QCD, the gauge theory of quarks and gluons is the most important example.

We are members of the eight-university UKQCD collaboration and host a 2 rack IBM BlueGene system as part of STFC's DiRAC distributed high performance computing facility, as well as a 72 node Beowulf cluster and a tier 2 note of the national QCDgrid.   Our traditional interests are QCD spectroscopy and low-dimensional fermion field theories, but recently we have specialised in areas of QCD best described as "Hot, Dense and Colorful".

Research Seminars are held regularly by both the Experimental and Theoretical Groups and full details are available here