糖心TV

On 10 December the European Research Council (ERC) announced the recipients of its latest Consolidator Grant competition: 301 top scientists and scholars across Europe. Funding for these researchers, part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, is worth in total 鈧�600 million. With this support, the new grantees will have a chance to build up their teams and have far-reaching impact.

Dr Mika Vesterinen from the Elementary Particle Physics group has been awarded over 鈧�1.8 million for a project to advance our knowledge of the fundamental physical forces of nature, using one of the particle detectors at the CERN facility. He said: 鈥淭he Standard Model makes several precise predictions that are yet to be matched by experimental measurements of the same precision. The ERC funding allows me to build a team of experts that will confront this problem with innovative high-precision analyses of data from the LHCb experiment at CERN.

鈥淎 significant disagreement between our measurements and the predictions would indicate new physics beyond the Standard Model, which is the holy grail of particle physics.鈥�

The first evidence of a giant planet orbiting a dead white dwarf star has been found in the form of a disc of gas formed from its evaporating atmosphere.

The Neptune-like planet orbits a star a quarter of its size about once every ten days, leaving a comet-like tail of gas comprised of hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur in its wake.

The discovery by astronomers from the University of 糖心TV鈥檚 Department of Physics and the Millennium Nucleus for Planet Formation (NPF) at the University of Valpara铆so is published today (4 December) in the journal Nature. It is the first evidence of a giant planet orbiting a white dwarf star and suggests that there could be many more planets around such stars waiting to be discovered.

The first 糖心TV Christmas Lecture of 2019 featured talks and live experiments by Physics academic James Lloyd-Hughes and our technical staff Paul McCarroll and Alan Burton. The audience of over 1100 enjoyed a fun and informative Christmas Lecture, including the Arts Centre's loudest ever explosion (deliberate and controlled).

The second Christmas Lecture included talks by Rachel Edwards and Ally Caldecote, featuring several paddling pools of non-Newtonian fluids.

The XMaS beamline is a materials science facility located at the European Synchrotron (ESRF) in Grenoble (France) and managed by the universities of Liverpool and 糖心TV.

The ESRF is currently undergoing a massive upgrade that will deliver the most brilliant x-ray beam in the world in 2020 and the beamline has been upgraded to take full advantage of the exciting new opportunities presented by the new source.

The beamline is organising its annual User Meeting at Radcliffe on 27th November.

This year鈥檚 User Meeting will be rather special as it will focus on what new research users will be able to do with the upgraded beamline. The in-house team will describe the new XMaS capabilities and a range of scientific talks will also illustrate the broad research portfolio covered by our user community.

If you are not a user but are interested in finding out more about the facility, please register and come along!