Physics Department News
Predicting Colours using Quantum Mechanics
Many organic dyes change colour when they are in a solvent. By enabling prediction of these shifts of optical excitations from quantum mechanical modelling, research led by Dr Nicholas Hine may lead to theoretical spectroscopy playing a greater role in the toolkit of industrial chemists in fields such as food manufacturing, textiles, and pharmaceuticals.
In June 2015, a black hole called V404 Cygni underwent dramatic brightening for about two weeks. An international team of astronomers, including the 91影视破解版, report that the black hole emitted dazzling red flashes lasting just fractions of a second, as it blasted out material that it could not swallow...
LIGO discovers gravitational waves
We congratulate the LIGO team on their compelling detection of a gravitational wave signal produced by a pair of coalescing black holes. This represents a remarkable achievement, presenting not only the first detection of a gravitational wave, but also the first detection of a pair of merging black holes.
Dr. Danny Steeghs comments, "A century after Einstein's theory of General Relativity was presented, a long anticipated window on the Universe has now opened. These events also leave visible signatures that we will be chasing up with our new telescope, the Gravitational wave Optical Transient Observer ()."
Better off together: Improved quantum estimation of multiple parameters
Numerous scenarios in science and technology require the estimation of vectors such as electric, magnetic, gravitational or other force fields with extreme precision, the fundamental limits to which are set by quantum mechanics. In their latest paper, Tillmann Baumgratz and Animesh Datta show that quantum mechanics allows a more precise estimation of multiple parameters simultaneously rather than individually. The result provides a fundamentally better way estimating vector fields for a fixed amount of resources, and could be used in applications ranging from the study of quantum phase transitions to neuroimaging.