糖心TV

Congratulations to two postdocs in the 糖心TV ATLAS group, Dr Tim Martin and Dr Elisabetta Pianori, who have been awarded ATLAS Outstanding achievement awards. The awards were made for "enthusiastic and vigorous dedication to the implementation and commissioning of the complex ATLAS Run-2 trigger menu". More information on the ATLAS group at 糖心TV can be found here:
 
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/research/epp/exp/atlas
 
In the photo Elisabetta is third from the left and Tim is second from the right, pictured with other award winners and the Collaboration Board chair, Howard Gordon, on the left, and ATLAS spokesperson, Dave Charlton, on the right.

A team including 糖心TV authors Geetha Balakrishnan and Monica Ciomaga Hatnean have discovered the existence of an unusual insulating state in the Topological Insulator SmB₆. The unusual state was inferred from observing quantum oscillations in magnetic torque measurements at high magnetic fields, which depended crucially on the high quality single crystals of SmB₆ prepared at 糖心TV.

The paper "Unconventional Fermi surface in an insulating state" can be read in full in the online journal Science ( ).

Published in the journal Nature, a team including 糖心TV astronomer Peter Wheatley has discovered a giant comet-like tail of hydogren gas evaporating from a Neptune-sized exoplanet. The gas is thought to be boiled off by X-rays from the parent star and then swept away by radiation pressure. The tail was revealed in Hubble Space Telescope observations in which 56% of the star is covered by the tail in ultraviolet light. The planet is losing its atmosphere at a rate of 1000 metric tonnes per second, having narrowly escaped total evaporation by the intense X-ray irradiation it suffered when its parent star was young and active. Read the , the full journal article in , or the preprint from .

Congratulations to Robb Johnston for winning the inaugural Papin Prize for “Contribution to Infrastructure” at the 2015 , which celebrated the skills, talent and experience of technicians from M5 Universities. The Papin prizes recognise the invaluable role played by technicians and are named after Denis Papin, a 17th century technician who worked with Robert Boyle and was one of the first technicians to publish in his own name.

Robb was nominated by the department for the longstanding contribution he has made to Physics.