This year's review panel have been carefully evaluating all the applications and are pleased to announce the winners of the 2024/2025 Developing Talent Awards.
They are
One important job of being a researcher is sharing our work and love for science with the general public at science fairs such as Durham’s hugely successful annual Celebrate Science event. Children and their grown-ups return year after year to participate in hands-on activities that help them learn about the world around them. This year, the UK has been lucky enough to witness two spectacular displays of the aurora borealis (Northern Lights) which is caused by charged particles from the sun interacting with the Earth’s atmosphere. Physicists can tell what atoms are involved in creating the aurora by looking at the different colours of light produced, a technique known as spectroscopy.
I plan to use the Developing Talent Award to create a hands-on activity showcasing the physics behind the aurora and the tools we can use to study it. By exciting small gas ampoules with a Tesla coil and creating glowing plasmas, participants can perform spectroscopy on their own mini auroras. I will hire a summer student to develop the final product which can be taken to Celebrate Science and other events in the future.
Ultracold molecules are a promising platform for quantum science because of their rich energy-level structure and controllable interactions. They have long lived rotational states which can be used to store quantum information, allowing them to be used as qubits or as the building blocks for simulators of condensed matter systems.
Trapping scheme to keep individual Rb and Cs atoms tightly, but separately, confined. The two atoms will then be brought together to form a RbCs molecule.However, the rich structure of molecules makes them difficult to cool to ultracold temperatures. One way around this is to first prepare ultracold atoms and then combine them to form ultracold molecules.
This project will focus on how tight atomic confinement can be exploited to enhance the efficiency with which ultracold molecules can be formed. I will prepare co-trapped Rb and Cs atoms in a focussed laser beam. The atoms will be held tightly with an optical lattice which will prevent them colliding, allowing them to be further cooled to the ground state of motion. By switching the lattice off, the atoms will come together and form a molecule. The efficiency of this technique should be higher than in previous demonstrations because of the cooling which is possible when the atoms are tightly confined.
Galaxies, including our own, grow hierarchically through mergers. Accreted galaxies of sufficient mass bring with them old, dense star clusters known as globular clusters. These are excellent tracers of accretion since their high densities and luminous nature make them observable even in the outer galaxy. The Gaia mission made it possible to trace the origins of globular clusters kinematically, revealing that around 40% originated from a few major mergers.
Since debris from multiple accretion events and in-situ populations can overlap, dynamics alone are not enough. However, the Milky Way globular cluster age-metallicity distribution is bifurcated, with the older, metal-rich clusters associated to an in-situ origin while the others were accreted. Currently, systematic uncertainties in the ages prevent us from confidently separating in-situ and accreted clusters at low metallicity.
The CARMA project aims to resolve this with a homogeneous catalogue of all Milky Way globular cluster ages. The precision reached will allow us to distinguish accreted and in-situ clusters at low metallicity and even separate the different progenitors, enabling accurate determination of their accretion times. The PDDTA will facilitate visits to INAF, enabling me to form connections and learn from experts in the field of globular clusters, including those leading CARMA.
Strong gravitational lensing is a powerful tool in astronomy, providing unique insights into galaxy mass distributions, the morphologies of lensed galaxies, and the nature of dark matter. Recent advances in sub-mm and radio interferometry, particularly with ALMA and VLBI, have enabled the highest resolution images of these systems—up to five times better than optical telescopes—leading to transformative progress in the field. However, modeling these high-resolution datasets presents significant computational challenges, due to the massive volume of data generated. To address this, the strong lensing group at Durham has developed a new approach, soon to be released as part of our PyAutoLens software, making this problem tractable and unlocking new possibilities for scientific exploration.
This workshop will introduce this new functionality and demonstrate how it can be integrated into research workflows. It will feature scientific talks and hands-on training, fostering collaboration among researchers working with high-resolution interferometric data. Through the PDDTA, the workshop aims to support early-career researchers and promote the adoption of this advanced lensing methodology. This initiative is particularly timely, as the number of observed high-resolution lenses has more than tripled in recent years, making such publicly available tools essential for advancing the field.
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