Director's Message

Dear Colleagues,

I see the community is gradually coming back over the next week. I hope your holidays have brought some relaxation.

Last week I saw the wonderful news of Canberra-made ion thrusters in space. Fuelled with sublimating naphthalene these novel thrusters derive their name from the famous migratory, gregarious and edible Bogong moth, Agrotis infusa. Developed by EmProf Rod Boswell of Boswell Technologies and manufactured in the Space Plasma Power and Propulsion (SP3/NPAA) lead by Prof Christine Charles the thruster had its first run in space onboard Skykraft 3 constellation last November. Two of the engineering team are seen above, Matt Shadwell (left) and Mahdi Davoodianidalik, and below Mahdi holds the completed thruster. Having very low power requirements of around a few watts these thrusters are ideally suited for Cubesats. The naphthalene propellent allows a total impulse of around 400 Newtonseconds for an average 2U Cubesat, meaning that at maximum thrust of 2 milliNewtons, the Bogong thruster will operate for about 60 hours. My congratulations to this great partnership and their recent success in orbit.

Please note that the ANU Open Day is early in the year, see below. Volunteers are very welcomed.

Have a good week. I’m back on deck from Monday.
Tim

When nuclei collide, protons and neutrons zip back and forth between them, even if they stay a significant distance apart and don’t touch.

Physicists measured nuclei bouncing off one another, without sufficient energy to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between the two positively charged nuclei, and found that after the collision, the nuclei had turned into different elements, thanks to changes in proton and neutron number.

» read more

First resonance-gradient nonlinear metasurfaces have been designed and demonstrated by Piyush Jangid et al in Advanced Materials 36(2), 2307494 (2024). The concept is applied to observe the resonant enhancement of high harmonics generated from the gradient metasurfaces with varying geometrical being used in conjunction with a tunable excitation laser to provide a wide spectral coverage of resonantly-enhanced tunable generation of multiple optical harmonics. The work is a collaboration between FTP and EPFL in Lausanne (Switzerland), and details can be found here.

The summer research scholarship program officially concluded on Friday (19 January) and the summer scholars who worked on projects in our School presented their final talks last Thursday.

It was a really nice group of students who came from universities in New Zealand, Queensland and ANU.

The talks they presented were very interesting and very well done, with some great research intertwined with good humour.

Thank you to all the supervisors who worked with these students over the summer!

As is now the tradition, we took some photos in front of the Physics sign!

Staff Movements

Cedric Simenel will be away 20/11/23 - 31/1/24
^{Yuri Kivshar will be Acting HoD in this period}

Ben Buchler will be away January 2024
^{Jodie Bradby will be acting Associate Director (Education)
Please direct all physics education queries to pec.physics@anu.edu.au or ade.physics@anu.edu.au}

2024 Wall Planners

College Hot Desking In Physics

Finance, HR & RM Teams
Thursday Mornings
^{Lv2 Tearoom, Bldg 160}