Published in the Research School of Physics Event Horizon
Vol45 Issue22 1–5 June 2020

Research

Information for all Departmental research and professional staff can be found in this section. We will be updating this link continuously with FAQs, the communications strategy, key contact people and support strategies.

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We can use this time to be productive - work on manuscript drafts, thesis chapters, read things in-depth or learn something new.  Please stay in touch with your colleagues and your supervisor, and most importantly be positive and plan for the future.

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Congratulations to Yuri Kivshar and his team on the Advanced Photonics Editors-in-Chief award: Following a rigorous selection process, their article entitled "Bound states in the continuum and Fano resonances in the strong mode coupling regime" was selected as the 2019 Advanced Photonics Editors-in- Chief Choice Award paper. Please see here for more info.

Timescale for quantum equilibration and dissipation in nuclear collisions
It is well known that two classical systems with differing properties (e.g., two fluids of different colours or temperatures) that are able to exchange matter in some way tend to equilibrate their initial asymmetry over time. This equilibration process also occurs in quantum systems, e.g., in collisions of atomic nuclei. The recent theoretical study published in Physical Review Letters by C. Simenel and his US collaborators from Vanderbilt University shows that time scales to equilibrate initial mass or charge asymmetries in nuclear collisions are universal, i.e., they do not depend on which nuclei we choose to collide. 

Comparing timescales of equilibration and dissipation processes — which, according to Einstein, are two sides of the same coin — it is shown that dissipation of initial kinetic energy into internal excitations is essentially due to exchange of nucleons between the collision partners in the first zeptosecond (21 orders of magnitude faster than a second) following contact.

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Members
Elena Ostrovskaya  (Chair)
Greg Lane
Hans Bachor
Jodie Bradby
Ken Baldwin
Marcus Doherty
Matt Thompson 
Michael Shats
Michaela Fröhlich
Mohammad Saadatfar 
Nanda Dasgupta
Yuri Kivshar