News archive

1st March

TCM congratulates Elis Roberts on a successful viva. Elis now moves to InstaDeep where he will be working as a machine learning research engineer in its biology team.

23rd February

TCM congratulates Dr Antonio Štrkalj on being elected to a Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral fellowship. In the autumn he will leave TCM for the Department of Physics, University of Zagreb, Croatia, where he will take up this two-year Fellowship, continuing his work on two-dimensional many-body localisation.

16th December

Recent work by TCM PhD student Jonathan Nilsson Hallén, along with his supervisor Prof Claudio Castelnovo and collaborators in Germany, America and Argentina, has led to the discovery of a fractal pattern in a perfect crystal. Not only had a fractal not been observed in an undisordered crystal before, but this result explains puzzling experimental data stretching back for over a decade. This work has been published in the journal Science.

2nd December

TCM congratulates Siyu Chen on being awarded the annual Cavendish prize for the best paper in Computational Physics from a PhD student for his paper nonuniform grids for Brillouin zone integration and interpolation. We also congratulate Jonathan Nilsson Hallén on winning the annual Cavendish prize in Theoretical Physics. Both prizes were presented at the Graduate Student Conference on 1st December.

9th November

TCM belatedly congratulates both Ivona Bravic and Clara Wanjura on their successful PhD vivas. Ivona is now working in Berlin as a Sustainability Consultant in the renewable energy sector. Clara now works as a postdoc in Florian Marquardt's Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Erlangen.

1st October

As the new Academic Year commences, TCM welcomes three new Postdocs and Fellows, and eight new Graduate Students. TCM wishes its new members a pleasant and productive time in the Group, and wishes those leaving every success.

We particularly congratulate Dr Katarzyna Macieszczak as she moves to be an Assistant Professor in the Theoretical Physics Group at Warwick.

22nd September

TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu Monserrat on being awarded the Young Investigator in Theoretical Physics prize by the Spanish Royal Physics Society for "his outstanding contribution to the theoretical physics of materials, developing new methods to calculate finite temperature and high pressure properties," which will "allow a better understanding of compounds of high technological relevance with implications in organic semiconductors, topological materials and photovoltaic cells."

30th August

TCM congratulates Angela Harper and Tobias Schaich on their successful PhD vivas. Angela is moving to the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin to start a postdoc under a Max Planck Fellowship, and Tobias hopes to continue his research on novel communications technologies.

27th June

TCM congratulates Dr Pieter Claeys on his recent move to the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems where he now heads his own Research Group on the Dynamics of Quantum Information.

20th June

TCM congratulates Dr Daniel Bennett on receiving the 2022 Sam Edwards Thesis Prize from the IoP's Theory of Condensed Matter Group. The prize is for the thesis which "contributes most strongly to the advancement of theoretical condensed matter physics," is open to all at institutions in the UK and Ireland, and includes a bottle of wine from Sir Sam's cellar, now owned by Caius College. Danny is now working as a postdoc at the University of Liège.

15th June

TCM congratulates Benjamin Remez on a successful PhD viva. Benji now leaves TCM to take up a Yale Prize Fellowship in Yale's Condensed Matter Theory Group.

5th May

TCM congratulates Andrea Pizzi on a successful PhD viva. Andrea is taking up a postdoc position at Harvard before returning as a Trinity College Junior Research Fellow.

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3rd May

TCM congratulates its alumni Drs David O'Regan and Paul Eastham on being elected as Fellows of Trinity College Dublin last month.

8th April

TCM is delighted to have received a £3.67m grant from EPSRC. This four-year grant, which includes collaborators from Materials Science, DAMTP and the Sanger Institute, provides flexible, long-term funding allowing TCM to continue to undertake the innovative, high risk, high reward research that, historically, has had significant impact.

21st March

TCM congratulates Nora Martin on her successful PhD viva. Nora is now continuing her research in Biological Physics as a postdoc in Oxford.

2nd March

TCM congratulates Rhys Goodall on successfully completing his PhD. Rhys is currently working at a start-up in California.

11th February

TCM congratulates Bo Peng on being awarded a Magdalene College Junior Research Fellowship. He will remain in TCM working on applications of Density Functional Theory.

11th February

TCM congratulates Nick Woods on successfully completing his PhD. His thesis has joined the many others downloadable from our thesis page.

24th January

TCM congratulates Andrea Pizzi on being awarded a Trinity College Junior Research Fellowship to further his research on nonequilibrium many-body systems. Before starting at Trinity, Andrea will move to Harvard as a postdoc in Prof Norman Yao's group.

11th January

TCM congratulates Dr Robert-Jan Slager on being awarded an European Research Council Starting Grant of over £1m to continue his work on multi-gap topological physics. His work applies elegant mathematical principles to real materials, predicting observable phenomena, and is particularly relevant to the fields of electronics and quantum computing.

4th January

With great sadness we report the death of Prof Mark Warner, FRS, following a short illness. Mark had a distinguished career in soft condensed matter, particularly liquid crystals. He was also devoted to widening access to Physics and Mathematics at school level, being instrumental in setting up the Senior Physics Challenge followed by Isaac Physics. Following his recent retirement, he retained a post that allowed him to continue his research and outreach.

Obituary in The Guardian.

7th December

TCM congratulates Jessica Halliday on her successful PhD viva. Jessica is now working for Bain & Company in London.

30th November

TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu Monserrat on being awarded the 2021 James Clerk Maxwell Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics. The citation highlights his "exceptional contributions to the development of computational techniques that bring temperature to modern electronic structure methods, and their application to topological materials, photovoltaics, superconductors and planetary physics."

29th November

TCM congratulates Bo Peng on being awarded the annual Cavendish prize for the best paper in Computational Physics from a PhD student. It was awarded for Topological phonons in oxide perovskites controlled by light, published in Science Advances. We also congratulate Gunnar Lange who won a runner-up prize for the best talk at the Cavendish Graduate Student Conference.

19th November

TCM congratulates Daniel Bennett on a successful PhD viva. Danny is now working as a postdoc with Prof Philippe Ghosez at the University of Liège.

19th November

TCM congratulates three PhD students, Gunnar Lange, Patrick Taylor and Jack Whaley-Baldwin, on their recent attendance of an Nvidia CUDA/python workshop.

8th October

As the new Academic Year commences, TCM wishes its new members a pleasant and productive time in the Group, and wishes those leaving every success.

We also congratulate Dr Nur Ünal on being elected as a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College, and Prof Claudio Castelnovo on being elected a Fellow of the Max Planck Society at the Max Plank Graduate Centre for Quantum Materials. Both remain in TCM.

20th September

TCM congratulates Michael Hutcheon on a successful PhD viva. Michael has moved to Nottingham to start a postdoc in the Quantum Electronic Structure Techniques group of Dr Andrew Teale.

20th September

TCM congratulates Dr Adrien Hallou on being elected a Fellow of Darwin College.

13th September

TCM congratulates Dr Bingqing Cheng on being awarded the Volker Heine Young Investigator Award by Psi-k.

4th August

TCM congratulates Dr Bingqing Cheng as she starts to set up her own research group in the IST, Austria, where she will continue to develop methods to extend the scope of atomistic simulations. She takes up her new post of Assistant Professor at the start of September.

24th June

TCM congratulates Dr Jan Behrends on being awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship which he will take up in January. He will remain in TCM continuing his research on topology and many-body chaos.

10th June

TCM congratulates Max McGinley on being awarded the Institute of Physics' Theory of Condensed Matter Group's Sam Edwards Thesis Prize for his thesis Dynamical Aspects of Topological Quantum Systems. Max is currently a postdoc at Oxford, but is expected to return to TCM and his Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College.

10th June

TCM congratulates Can Koçer on his successful PhD viva. Can is now working as a Data Science Fellow at the AI company faculty.

17th May

TCM congratulates Alice Shipley on her successful PhD viva. She will soon start work with Goldman Sachs as a Quantitative Engineer.

6th May

TCM congratulates Prof Ben Simons on his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Prof Simons has a distinguished research record in a broad range of fields from quantum condensed matter physics to developmental biology, particularly the regulation of stem cells. His experimental work is based at the Gurdon Institute, and he was TCM's Head of Group for several years before moving to DAMTP.

9th April

Prof Volker Heine's book on Group Theory now has a Hindi translation, thanks to the work of Prof KS Sharma at IIS. Prof Heine has donated his share of the royalties to fund an annual medal for the top MSc student in Physics there, and the first medal has just been awarded.

19th March

TCM is very sorry to learn of the death, on 15th March, of Prof. Neil Ashcroft. Neil came to Cambridge from New Zealand to undertake a PhD under Prof Volker Heine. He graduated in 1964, and remained a regular visitor to TCM after moving to America where he enjoyed a distinguished career. He co-authored the seminal text-book Solid State Physics with David Mermin, and his foundational works on superconductivity in atomic hydrogen underpin the recent advances in room temperature superconductivity in metallic hydrides.

16th March

TCM congratulates Dr Pieter Claeys and Prof Austen Lamacraft on their paper entitled Ergodic and Nonergodic Dual-Unitary Quantum Circuits with Arbitrary Local Hilbert Space Dimension being selected for the front cover of Physical Review Letters, as well as being an Editors' Suggestion. One can also read their summary of this work.

9th March

TCM congratulates Attila Szabó and Philipp Verpoort on their successful PhD vivas. Attila has already moved to a Junior Research Fellowship at Wadham College, Oxford, and Philipp has since secured a job at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

25th February

TCM congratulates Mark Johnson on a successful PhD viva. Mark will remain in TCM for the immediate future.

22nd February

3D printing is the latest area to benefit from the machine learning capabilities of Alchemite, the versatile deep learning platform developed by Dr Gareth Conduit and commercialised by Intellegens. A collaboration between Ansys and Intellegens will help to optimise many aspects of the 3D printing process.

26th January

Physics World, the magazine of the Institute of Physics, has named the Josephson Effect as one of the ten greatest predictions in Physics.

18th January

Intellegens has announced a collaboration with the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and Boeing to use Intellegens' machine learning algorithms to develop new metal alloys for aerospace applications as part of the National Aerospace Technology Exploitation Programme. The algorithms used were developed in TCM by Dr Gareth Conduit, CTO of Intellegens.

6th January

TCM belatedly congratulates James Darby on a successful PhD viva last Term. James is now working as a postdoc for Prof Gábor Csányi of the Engineering Department, and will doubtless stay in close contact with TCM.

26th November

TCM congratulates Clara Wanjura on being awarded the Cavendish's annual postgraduate theory prize for her paper entitled Topological framework for directional amplification in driven-dissipative cavity arrays published in Nature Communications. She will present this work at the Cavendish's Postgraduate Student Conference.

16th November

TCM congratulates Darryl Foo on his successful PhD viva. Darryl now has a research fellowship working with Prof Shaffique Adam in the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials in the National University of Singapore.

4th November

TCM congratulates Dr Johannes Hofmann on his appointment as a Senior Lecturer in the Physics Department of the University of Gothenburg.

4th November

TCM congratulates Alex Wade on his successful PhD viva. Alex is now a postdoc working with Prof Peter Coveney in UCL.

31st October

Dr Gareth Conduit and TCM alumnus Dr Tom Whitehead of Intellegens, along with TCM alumni Drs Matt Segall and Ben Irwin of Optibrium, have launched Cerella, an artifical intelligence software platform for drug discovery. Cerella uses deep learning methods from Alchemite, which is developed by Dr Conduit.

23rd October

TCM congratulates Dr Bingqing Cheng on being awarded a Departmental Early Career Academic Fellowship by the Department of Computer Science. Dr Cheng will remain affiliated to TCM as she starts this Fellowship and continues her research in machine learning as applied to properties of materials.

We also congratulate Dr Jan Behrends on being elected to a Fellowship at Darwin College.

1st October

TCM congratulates Dr Alpha Lee on the award of a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship to support his research activities on the design of new materials and drugs. He uses physical insights and statistical methods to develop models that can learn from large data sets.

18th September

TCM congratulates Prof Volker Heine FRS on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Volker arrived in the Cavendish from New Zealand in 1954 to study for a PhD under Sir Nevill Mott, and soon joined the new Solid State Theory group, later renamed TCM. He was its Head from 1975 until 1997, and one of the founders of the Psi-k network. He has made many contributions to theoretical and computational electronic structure research, and remains active in TCM.

15th September

TCM congratulates Max McGinley on his successful PhD viva. Max is moving to a postdoc position at Oxford University's Physics Department.

14th September

TCM congratulates Nicolò Forcellini on his successful PhD viva. Nicolò is now moving to a postdoc position at the BAQIS (Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences) and Tsinghua University.

3rd September

TCM congratulates Petr Zapletal on his successful PhD viva. Petr is now moving to a postdoc position at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

27th August

TCM congratulates Dr Gareth Conduit on being offered a three year extension to his Royal Society University Research Fellowship. He will remain in TCM continuing his research applying machine learning to designing new materials and drugs.

7th August

TCM congratulates Attila Szabó on being elected to the Keeley-Rutherford Junior Research Fellowship at Wadham College where he will work with groups from both the Rudolf Peierls Centre and ISIS.

27th July

Dr Jerelle Joseph has shared her experience of doing a PhD at Cambridge in an interview with DiscoverPhDs.

27th July

TCM congratulates Stephen Spurrier on successfully defending his PhD thesis. Stephen now works on machine learning for Tesco in London.

24th July

TCM congratulates Dr Rosana Collepardo on her joint lectureship in Chemistry and Genetics. She describes her research and her career in this short video. Similarly we congratulate Dr Andreas Nunnenkamp on his proleptic Assistant Professorship at the University of Nottingham. We are pleased that both will remain affiliated with TCM as they look after their teams and projects based here.

6th July

TCM gets a new look to its home page. The old style, with its three tabs, is recorded above, and can still be seen.

2nd July

TCM congratulates Yu Yang Liu on his successful PhD viva. Yang is moving on to a postdoc in MIT before returning to A*STAR in Singapore

2nd July

Liverpool F.C. wins the Premier League, aided by the data analysis team led by Dr Ian Graham, former member of TCM.

1st July

TCM congratulates Dr Sebastian Ahnert as he starts a lectureship in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. His new Department is not far from TCM, and we expect him to maintain his links with TCM.

24th June

Dr Bartomeu Monserrat has launched a YouTube channel dedicated to explaining Quantum Mechanics, and Dr Michael Rutter has launched a small website of some Maths and Physics experiments one can do on a Raspberry Pi.

15th June

TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu Monserrat on being named by JPhys Materials as an Emerging Leader 2020 for his development of first principles quantum mechanical methods to study material properties at non-zero temperatures.

8th June

The fourth OPTIMADE workshop to develop a common API to access materials databases is running this week, hosted by CECAM (virtually) at Lausanne. The workshop is co-organized by Dr Conduit, with Matthew Evans helping to lead the development of an open source python library.

4th June

TCM congratulates Ezequiel Rodriguez Chiacchio on successfully defending his PhD thesis in his viva.

29th May

A team of TCM PhD students, Yu Yang Liu, Lupeng Yang and Siyu Chen, won prizes in the Future of Blockchain competition. They applied the blockchain to train multiple machine learning models collaboratively while keeping data private. Their platform, DeepVerse, was initiated and is developed by Yu Yang Liu.

18th May

TCM congratulates Dr Nur Ünal as she starts her Royal Society Newton International Fellowship whilst remaining in TCM. She will be working on topology in ultracold quantum gases far from equilibrium.

1st May

TCM congratulates Dr Sarah Teichmann on her election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Her research, on protein complexes, and on gene regulation in the immune system, bridges computational and experimental molecular biology. It has produced insights into cancer, and into respiratory and auto-immune diseases. She is also the co-founder and co-leader of the Human Cell Atlas consortium.

30th April

The entry to the Open Source Malaria prize by TCM members Dr Gareth Conduit & Alex Wade and TCM alumni Dr Ben Irwin, Dr Tom Whitehead & Dr Matthew Segall has been experimentally verified as the most potent compound submitted. It was discovered using the machine learning algorithm Alchemite™ invented and developed by Dr Conduit.

1st April

The TCM Group is very sorry to learn of the death, on 29th March, of Prof. Philip W. Anderson, one of the most influential condensed matter theorists. Phil was Head of TCM from 1967 to 1975, and delighted to point out that, in naming the Group, he coined the term "condensed matter physics." In 1977 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with John Van Vleck and Sir Nevill Mott) for "fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems."

Obituaries: Physics World, New York Times.

4th March

TCM replaces its failing coffee machine with a new model, one which contains much more electronics than the previous ones.

14th February

TCM congratulates Max McGinley on being elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College to further his research on the behaviour of complex quantum systems.

24th January

Congratulations to Will Grant on passing his PhD viva. Will is moving to California to pursue his career.

12th January

Scientists from all around the world gathered to celebrate Mike Payne's 60th Birthday on 11 January 2020. The Old Library at Pembroke College provided a splendid backdrop for the event, at which the audience heard about Mike's lofty scientific achievements, in particular the development and commercialization of the venerable CASTEP and ONETEP codes, and colleagues former and present reminisce about their time with Mike in Cambridge. The day was finished off with a fine Dinner in Pembroke.

7th January

Angela Harper, one of TCM's PhD students, has been interviewed for the University's Research News pages, where she discusses her computational research in lithium-ion battery materials and her work with Women in STEM programmes.

12th December

A neural network developed jointly by Intellegens and Optibrium is one of the winners of the Open Source Malaria prize for predicting new anti-malarial compounds. Their model was based on Alchemite, an algorithm developed by Dr Gareth Conduit, and TCM alumni Drs Whitehead and Irwin worked to apply it to this particular task.

6th December

Congratulations to Andrea Pizzi on winning the Abdus Salam theory prize at the 2019 Cavendish Graduate Student Conference.

21st November

TCM congratulates Dr Bartomeu Monserrat on being appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Materials Science. The Department is only a few hundred yards away, and we hope to continue to work closely with Dr Monserrat after he takes up his new post in January.

12th November

The November issue of Physics World includes an interview with Dr Gareth Conduit describing how he formed a startup company, Intellegens, to commercialize novel neural network techniques whose applications span alloy design for jet engines, 3D printing, and drug design.

29th October

TCM congratulates Beñat Mencia on passing his PhD viva. Beñat is now working on machine learning for Bosch in California.

3rd October

As the new Academic Year commences, TCM congratulates Prof Austen Lamacraft on promotion to being a professor, and Dr Jorge R Espinosa on gaining a Fellowship at Emmanuel College.

The Group also welcomes six new postdocs and visitors, and twelve new graduate students. We wish all a pleasant a productive time in the Group.

12th September

TCM congratulates Kevin Duff on passing his PhD viva. Kevin now works for Enthought in its Cambridge offices.

2nd September

TCM congratulates Edward Linscott on passing his PhD viva. Edward will be moving to the group of TCM alumnus Nicola Marzari at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.

26th July

We are delighted that TCM alumna, Dr Alix Pryde, has been elected to the Institute of Physics Council. She takes on this role on top of her other responsibilites as Director of Service Strategy and Operational Delivery at Sky UK and a Non-Executive Director at the King's College Hospital NHS Trust.

2nd July

We are delighted that, in this year's IoP Awards, Prof Mark Warner was awarded the Bragg Medal, jointly with Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright, for setting up and directing the Isaac Physics programme which "has revolutionised physics education for teachers and students in an extraordinary number of UK schools."

Prof Nigel Cooper received the Lord Rayleigh medal "for profound contributions to the quantum theory of many-particle systems, concerning both topological phases of cold atoms in artificial gauge fields and novel phenomena in electronic materials."

6th June

The first TCM research formal of the 2018-19 academic year took place on Thursday 6 June at St John's College. A fun night was had by all, hopefully the first of many!

22nd May

A pioneering application of machine learning by Gareth Conduit has been experimentally proven to predict accurately the properties of metal-organic frameworks. This class of materials has many promising applications including the extraction water from the air in the desert and the storage of dangerous gases including in hydrogen-based cars.

16th May

Danny Bennett has appeared on National Television speaking about his voluntary work to encourage people to sign up to be stem cell donors.

30th April

TCM congratulates Chris Parmee on successfully defending his PhD thesis. We wish him well for the future.

8th April

Image ©Nobel Media AB / Pi Frisk

It is with great sadness that we report the death of former colleague, Prof David Thouless. Prof Thouless held posts in TCM in the 1960s and 1980s, and was a frequent Summer visitor thereafter whilst working at the University of Washington, Seattle. His illustrious career contributing to the theory of phases of matter culminated in the award of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he is shown above left receiving from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

22nd March

We welcome Dr Bingqing Cheng who has just joined the Group as a Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College. She has recently completed her PhD at EPFL, working on statistical mechanics and atomistic modelling.

22nd February

Congratulations to Nontawit Cheewaruangroj for passing his PhD viva today. Nontawit is going on to work on public policy in science and technology for the Thai government.

17th January

Three TCM researchers, Yu Yang Liu, Bart Andrews, and Gareth Conduit, had their paper "Direct evaluation of the force constant matrix in quantum Monte Carlo" selected as Editors' Pick in the Journal of Chemical Physics 150, 034104 (2019). Well done!

3rd January

TCM congratulates Bart Andrews on passing his PhD viva. Bart is currently working as a postdoc in the University of Zurich.

13th December

TCM congratulates Ben Irwin on passing his PhD viva. Ben leaves us to work with a local company applying machine learning to drug design.

3rd December

TCM congratulates Alice Allen on passing her PhD viva. Alice remains in Cambridge, taking up a postdoc position with Prof Gábor Csányi in the Engineering Department.

29th November

Prof Mark Warner has just published Pre-University Mathematics for Sciences, the latest in a series of Sixth Form level text books aimed particularly at the Physical Sciences and available at isaacbooks.org. The series is sold at cost price, £1 per book, and over 120,000 copies have been sold.

15th November

TCM congratulates Dr Katarzyna Macieszczak on taking up the Henslow Research Fellowship at Selwyn College. She will remain in TCM as she continues her research on non-equilibrium quantum systems.

10th October

Dr Gareth Conduit has won a £1M InnovateUK award alongside Optibrium and the Medicines Discovery Catapult to use deep learning to improve the efficiency and productivity of drug discovery.

1st October

We congratulate Prof Ben Simons on the award of a Royal Society EP Abraham Research Professorship. He moves to DAMTP, and he will also establish an experimental lab. Ben has been central to activities in TCM and the Cavendish for many years, through his outstanding record of research across disciplines, and through his leadership, notably as Head of the TCM Group. We wish him every success in his new activities, and are pleased that he has chosen to remain co-affiliated with TCM.

30th September

As the new academic year starts TCM welcomes over a dozen new PhD students and two new postdocs, Drs Jan Behrends and Shovan Dutta. We wish all our new members a pleasant and productive time in the Group.

With the close of the 2017-18 academic year we express our best wishes to those who recently left TCM, moving to a variety of fulfilling positions in the UK and beyond.

11th September

Dr Gareth Conduit and startup Intellegens have licensed their deep learning code Alchemite™ to Optibrium for resale to clients in drug discovery. Optibrium CEO, Dr Matt Segall, who completed his PhD in TCM, comments "their deep learning technology, already proven in the field of materials design, has shown remarkable results when applied to challenging drug discovery".

10th September

Congratulations to Daniel Malz for passing his PhD viva. Daniel will shortly leave us to take up a postdoc postition at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics at Munich.

9th September

Daniel Rowlands passed his PhD viva and will take up a position in the Catholic Church.

8th September

We congratulate Dr Johannes Hofmann as he moves from a Research Fellowship at Caius to be a College Teaching Officer at Peterhouse, and from TCM to DAMTP.

20th August

Congratulations to Ed Tait for passing his PhD viva. Ed is now working for a local software company.

21st July

Congratulations to Graham Spink on graduating his PhD. We wish Graham well for his lectureship at the University of Chester.

19th July

Congratulations to Adam Smith on a successful PhD viva. We wish Adam well for the future: in September he leaves us for a postdoc position in Germany.

22nd June

Congratulations to Max McGinley on winning the Nature Reviews Physics prize for the best poster at the ICTP Conference on Quantum Dynamics of Disordered Interacting Systems in Trieste.

8th June

Congratulations to Bruno Loureiro on a successful PhD viva. We wish Bruno well for the future.

23rd May

Congratulations to Dr Bartomeu Monserrat on receiving a five-year Winton Fellowship for research on ab initio computer modelling of materials at room temperature, with applications including solar cells. Dr Monserrat will remain a member of TCM, and is TCM's fifth Winton Fellow.

4th May

Pavao Santak has been elected MCR President of Fitzwilliam College. Well done!

26th March

TCM congratulates Gabriel Constantinescu on a successful PhD viva. Gabriel now leaves us for the world of finance.

13th March

TCM is delighted that Bartomeu Monserrat won the Volker Heine Young Investigator award, presented at the German Physical Society's Spring Meeting.

14th February

TCM congratulates Angela Harper on receiving the American Physical Society's LeRoy Apker Award "for significant contributions to printed electronics research and outstanding leadership of the Society of Physics Students and Society of Women in STEM fields."

2nd February

TCM congratulates Joe Prentice on successfully defending his PhD thesis. Joe is now a postdoc at Imperial College.

23rd January

TCM congratulates Tom Whitehead on successfully defending his PhD thesis "Interacting Fermi Gases". Well done!

13th December

Cambridge Enterprise has provided funding for Intellegens, a spin-out company, co-founded by Gareth Conduit, which has developed proprietary algorithms to allow neural networks to be trained on incomplete data. The technique has already been applied to materials design and drug discovery, but is much more generally applicable.

8th December

Our congratulations to Dr Alex Chin who is moving to a permanent academic post at the CNRS, Paris, in the New Year.

8th December

Our congratulations to Dr Paulo Medeiros who is moving to a permanent post at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute in the New Year.

7th December

TCM congratulates David Turban for passing his PhD viva.

3rd November

We congratulate Dr Michael Rutter on being asked to serve another one-year term as President of the Cambridge Branch of the UCU.

1st November

We welcome Dr Karolina Milowska who has just joined the Group as a postdoc working with Prof Mike Payne using linear scaling DFT. She previously worked in the Materials Science Department.

1st October

The new academic year sees TCM welcoming many new members. We extend a particular welcome to Dr Benjamin Béri, who joins us from Birmingham University to take up a joint lectureship between Physics and DAMTP. We also welcome Drs Matteo Brunelli and Tom Hiscock as postdocs, Profs David Bowler and Claudio Chamon as sabbatical visitors, and over a dozen new PhD students.

We wish all our new members a pleasant and productive time in the Group.

26th September

We are pleased to report that Edouard Hannezo will take up a faculty position at the Institute of Science and Technology near Vienna.

26th September

Philip Greulich has moved to a lectureship in the Mathematics Department of the University of Southampton.

26th September

Steffen Rulands has moved to start his own Research Group in the Max-Planck Institute for Complex System, Dresden.

14th September

TCM congratulates Nicholas Worth for passing his PhD viva. Nicholas is currently working for MathWorks.

11th September

TCM congratuates Gareth Conduit for winning the Society of Chemical Industry presentation award.

8th September

We are pleased that Andrew Morris has been appointed to a Lectureship at Birmingham University from October. He will remain in close contact with his many collaborators in TCM, and we expect him to be a frequent visitor.

6th September

We congratulate Sarah Morgan on being awarded a Springer Thesis prize for her PhD thesis. Sarah is now a Research Associate in Cambridge Neuroscience.

29th August

We congratulate Martin Mayo on his successful PhD viva.

22nd August

We are pleased that John Biggins has been appointed to a Lectureship in the Mechanics, Materials and Design Division of the Engineering Department, a position which he will take up in September. We are sure that John will retain strong links with TCM as he joins a Division already containing a TCM member, Prof Gábor Csányi.

1st August

We are pleased to report that Nigel Cooper has been selected as a 2017 Simons Investigator in Physics. The program provides "support for outstanding scientists in their most productive years, when they are establishing creative new research directions, providing leadership to the field and effectively mentoring junior scientists." Quoting from the citation, "Nigel has shown how to design optical lattices for cold atoms that provide controllable laboratories for exploring the physics of interacting particles in the presence of gauge fields. He is also known for foundational works on the topological Kondo effect and on quantum oscillations in topological insulators."

13th June

Dr Knolle's work as part of an international team including experimentalists from Oak Ridge National Lab has led to the observation of magnetic Majorana fermion quasiparticles. Neutron scattering experiments at very low temperatures in ruthenium trichloride showed close agreement to the theoretical quantum spin liquid predictions.

The image shows a neutron (blue line) scattering from RuCl₃ producing a Majorana fermion (green wave) which disrupts the electron spins. Image credit Jill Hemman / ORNL press release.

31st May

TCM congratulates Joseph Nelson on passing his PhD viva. Joseph remains with us as a postdoc in Andrew Morris's group.

29th May

Drs Andrew Morris and Paulo Medeiros, with PhD student Jamie Wynn, have simulated the world's thinnest metallic nanowire, a 1D chain of tellurium inside a carbon nanotube. The computational simulations revealed a number of different configurations which the Te atoms take up within the nanotube as the tube's diameter varies in the range 0.7nm to 1.1nm, with only the thinnest tubes giving a linear chain rather than a helical twisted chain. Collaborators in the University of Warwick have shown that their predictions match the structures found experimentally.

18th May

TCM congratulates James Hamp on passing his PhD viva.

16th May

TCM congratulates Johannes Knolle on gaining a lectureship at Imperial College. He will take up this post at the start of the new academic year, and we are pleased that he intends to continue to collaborate closely with TCM.

15th May

TCM congratulates Yang Liu on winning a poster prize at the CCP9 Young Researchers event.

3rd May

TCM congratulates Salvatore Tesoro on passing his PhD viva.

15th March

TCM congratulates Lars Schonenberg on passing his PhD viva.

10th December

Image ©Nobel Media AB / Pi Frisk

TCM alumni Prof David Thouless (pictured) and Prof Duncan Haldane receive the Physics Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

7th December

TCM celebrates its annual Christmas party, complete with traditional pantomime written, starred, and directed by the new 1st-year PhD students. Many thanks to all the new students, especially Mark Johnson for writing the pantomime and Ezequiel Rodriguez Chiacchio for leading the organisation. Merry Christmas to all!

4th November

We are delighted that Dr Rutter has been re-elected to President of the UCU Cambridge branch.

26th October

TCM congratulates Aurelio Romero-Bermudez on passing his PhD viva.

6th October

TCM congratulates Sarah Morgan on passing her PhD viva.

4th October

TCM is proud and delighted to announce that two of its alumni shared in the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. Prof. David J. Thouless moved from the Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Department in Cambridge to take up a lectureship in the Solid State Theory group (the early incarnation of TCM) from 1964-65 before moving to the University of Birmingham, where he remained on the faculty for many years. In 1980, David returned to TCM as a Royal Society Research Professor, moving soon after to the University of Washington, Seattle. Fortunately, he remained a frequent Summer visitor to the group. Prof. F. Duncan M. Haldane was a graduate student in TCM working under the supervision of another Nobel Laureate from the group, Prof. Philip Anderson, and receiving his PhD in 1978 before transferring to a post-doctoral position at the Institut Laue-Langevin. . Together with Cavendish graduate Prof. J. Michael Kosterlitz, they received the Nobel Prize "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter". Further information can be found at the Nobel website.

1st October

TCM starts the academic year by welcoming eleven new PhD students to its ranks. We are also delighted that Prof Emilio Artacho is now full-time with TCM.

The previous academic year saw our members gain lectureships elsewhere, as well as many other achievements. At this time we particularly congratulate Prof Gábor Csányi, a postdoc in TCM from 2001 to 2007, on becoming a Professor in Cambridge's Engineering Department.

29th August

We congratulate Thomas Bilitewski on passing his PhD viva. Thomas has a position in a Max Plank Institute.

19th August

We congratulate Sam Smith on passing his PhD viva. Sam leaves TCM for a job in London.

18th August

We congratulate Connie Hsueh on passing her MPhil viva. Connie is now a PhD student at Stanford University.

17th August

We congratulate Tom Price on passing his PhD viva. Tom recently started a postdoc position at Utrecht University.

13th July

We congratulate Edgar Engel on passing his PhD viva. Edgar will remain in TCM as a Trinity College Junior Research Fellow.

July

We congratulate Philip Greulich on his appointment to a Lectureship in Applied Mathematics at the University of Southampton.

15th April

Prof Sir David MacKay
1967-2016

With sadness we pass on the news that Prof. Sir David MacKay, FRS, Regius Professor of Engineering, visitor to TCM from 2013, has passed away after a battle with cancer. His enthusiasm, broad interest in science, and genius for communication made him a pleasure to know.

Many obituaries have been published, including in The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Bill Gates' blog.

18th March

We congratulate Gunnar Möller on his appointment to a Lectureship in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

26th February

We congratulate Jonathan Lloyd-Williams on passing his PhD viva. He will remain in TCM as a postdoc.

18th January

We congratulate Dr Danny Cole on being appointed to a lectureship in computational medicinal chemistry at Newcastle University. He will be much missed when he leaves in July.

12th January

We congratulate Edgar Engel on being offered a four year Junior Research Fellowship by Trinity College.

31st December

TCM congratulates Prof Sir David Mackay on receiving a knighthood in the Queen's New Year honours list for services to Scientific Advice in Government and Science Outreach.

23rd December

TCM celebrates Christmas two days early because all members now have complete web profiles. Merry Christmas and best wishes for the new year!

7th December

We congratulate Antoniya Aleksandrova on passing her PhD viva.

1st December

We congratulate Teresa Krieger on passing her PhD viva.

25th November

TCM is delighted that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has commited £75 million to rebuild the Cavendish Laboratory.

9th November

We congratulate Jian-Hao Li on passing his PhD viva.

2nd November

We are delighted that Dr Rutter has been re-elected unopposed to President of the UCU Cambridge branch.

18th October

TCM member Graham Spink awarded a Lectureship in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Chester.

12th October

Prof Simons delivered the Larmor Lecture to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. His title was "The statistical physics of stem cell biology: Dicing with fate".

1st October

We congratulate Dr Hannezo on taking a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, and Dr Hofmann on taking a Research Fellowship at Caius College.

As the new academic year starts, TCM welcomes fifteen new PhD students and visiting students, and five new post docs, visitors and Fellows.

18th September

Prof. Mark Warner's" The Isaac Physics Project" shortlisted for The Times Higher Education Awards 2015 Outstanding Digital Innovation in Teaching or Research award.

15th to 18th September

TCM hosted a Onetep Masterclass from 15th to 18th September attended by thirty researchers from the UK & Europe.

20th July

Congratulations to Prof Simons on being awarded the Royal Society's Gabor Medal 2015 for his "work analysing stem cell lineages in development, tissue homeostasis and cancer, revolutionising understanding of stem cell behaviour in vivo".

13th July

The TCM 60th photo is now available to view and order online.

10th July

To mark 60 years of SST/TCM, we held a half-day symposium and a celebratory dinner.

10th July

TCM's new website goes live at 11:36. First bug report at 11:37.

9th July

Congratulations to Professor Chris Pickard who has won the 2015 Rayleigh Medal.

10th June

TCM's Claudio Castelnovo has been promoted to a Readership.

10th June

Watch TCM's John Biggins explain the chain fountain on BBC1's the One Show!

7th May

It is with great sadness that we report the death of former colleague, Professor Sir Sam Edwards. Professor Sir Sam Edwards was the Cavendish Professor of Physics and Chairman of the Science Research Council.

18th March

Congratulations to TCM alumnus Prof Mike Cates on being elected to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics. Prior to moving to a chair in Edinburgh, Mike was a lecturer in TCM. Former holders of this chair include Profs Stephen Hawking, Paul Dirac, and Isaac Newton.

18th March

Congratulations to Prof Chris Pickard on being elected to the Sir Alan Cottrell Chair of Materials Science at Cambridge.

5th January

Dr Dmitry Kovrizhin is awarded an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship.