Director's Message

Dear Colleagues,

I’m pleased to share some wonderful news from six of our colleagues who were successful at promotion this year. When you next see them, please offer your congratulations;

Level B
Philipp Loesel (MP)
Zhe Li (EME)

Level C
Chathura Bandutunga (CGA)
Karl Wette (CGA)

Level D
John Debs (QST)
Ludovic Rapp (QST)

And, some fabulous news I’ve been sitting on all year has finally broken. On Monday, in London, a 10 year Rio Tinto funded Centre for Future Materials was opened incorporating a consortium of Imperial College London, Uni British Columbia, UC Berkeley, Witwatersrand and the ANU. This open research program will draw together ANU colleagues across four Colleges and the First Nations Portfolio into action research in broad social and technical topics on materials for the energy transition. By design this Centre will lead with a social science focus on technology translation. I’m so pleased that Physics will host the Centre coordinator, and our projects will augment the already fabulous Rio Tinto Partnership run out of Prof Mark Knackstedt’s group (MP). Dr Victor Pantano (MP/School) can be given full credit with winning ANU the opportunity to be the only Australian university in this $US150M consortium. My thanks to his vision and hard work in securing this decadal research gift for the ANU. It comes with perfect timing, when we all need to lean into knitting the strengths of the ANU together. My sincere thanks to Victor and my colleagues in RSES, RSBS, CPAS, RegNet, RSSS and First National portfolio for joining me in the foundational phase of this very significant centre.

Finally for this week, supervisors will have been emailed a link to a recently added function in HORUS called ANU Focus (under the Manager Self Service menu). The form allows a somewhat simplified PDR process and most notably puts the whole campus in synch on the same annual cycle (goal setting phase: Dec–Mar; checking in: Jun-Jul; reflection phase Oct-Dec). Help can be found here. I note that there are some supervisors with more than 7 staff reporting to them. In these cases it would be best if group supervision can be more equitably shared, or devolved. Please speak with your team, supervisor and then HR to balance supervision responsibilities. If you have PDRs in play at present I suggest you download them and use them as a basis for the new round.

I’ve pushed the School Executive back until Friday 13th Dec. Please speak with your Heads or representatives if you have topics to raise.

Above, a beautiful image provided by Dr Sam Legge (QST) is of a Rubidium Bose-Einstein Condensate on a thermal cloud containing ~10^9 atoms at around 30uK. With tweaks he and Dr Ryan Thomas are now in the 10’s of nK range. It’s fantastic to see the new labs gradually come online. Please send me in any lab-based pics you might like to share.

Have a great weekend.
Tim 

Oleg Kameshkov (PhD student, FTP) who is one of the winners of the Simulight Optics Challenge organised by The Optics society.

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Zuzana Slavkovska (NPAA) has been awarded the Outreach & Impact Award 2024 from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics. The award is recognising excellence in activities promoting particle physics and the Centre's work. The prize was given by Sue Barrell, the chair of the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL). SUPL is the first deep underground laboratory in Australia, where Zuzana is a part of the team building a direct dark matter detection experiment SABRE.

Pictured left to right: Sue Barrell (Chair of SUPL) & Zuzana Slavkovska

College Hot Desking In Physics

Finance, HR & RM Teams
Thursday Mornings
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EVENTS

Departmental seminars

Professor Davide D'Angelo - 9 December
ASTAROTH - All Sensitive crysTal ARray with lOw THreshold
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Dr Travis Mitchell - 9 December
Lattice Boltzmann Modelling of Two-Phase Flow in Porous and Fractured Media: Applications in gas diffusion electrodes and coal fractures
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Mr Sebastian Klimmer - 12 December
PROBING ULTRAFAST BANDGAP MODULATIONS AND VALLEY IMBALANCES IN ATOMICALLY THIN SEMICONDUCTORS
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Mr Lukas Jager - 12 December
Optical Coupling and Far-Field Emission of Semiconductor Nanowires
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Associate Professor James Sullivan - 12 December
The Jawun Experience
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Professor Andrei V. Lavrinenko - 13 December
Nanostructures in sensing and high harmonic generation
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