News archive

8th April

Today (8th April) is officially TCM's last day in "Cavendish II." Yesterday was spent packing, and much of the rest of the week will be spent unpacking.

TCM's home has been the top floor of the Mott Building of the Cavendish Laboratory for over fifty years. Much excellent work, many happy memories, many, many people, and several coffee machines, are all connected to our time in these old, but not particularly beautiful, buildings. We look forward to a productive era in the new Cavendish building, the Ray Dolby Centre.

17th March

This week (17th March) many TCM members are in California, presenting their research at the APS Global Physics Summit. PhD students presenting include Alex Gower Saddles-to-minima topological crossover and glassiness in the Rubik's Cube, Wojciech Jankowski Quantized responses in multigap topological phases, Balázs Póta Thermal Conductivity Predictions with Foundation Atomistic Models, Luca Rüegg Dualities of Paired Quantum Hall Bilayers States at ν_T=1/2+1/2, Alaric Sanders Experimentally tunable QED in dipolar-octupolar quantum spin ice and Ian Tan Classifying topological floppy modes in the continuum. Postdoctoral researchers presenting include Nilotpal Chakraborty Entanglement smectic and stripe order and Lucas Sá Theory of Irreversibility of Quantum Many-Body Systems. Recent leavers presenting work done in TCM include Drs Cecilie Glittum Wonderland of frustration: Magnetic moments and itinerant electrons on the pyrochlore lattice and Michele Simoncelli Origins of thermal-conductivity anomalies in solids with controlled atomic disorder.

4th March

Intellegens has announced Alchemite™ Suite, a new product suite that represents a step-change in ease-of-implementation and use for machine learning to accelerate R&D. The Suite delivers a new set of software apps targeted on key tasks for development teams in chemicals, materials, foods, life sciences, and manufacturing. The machine learning method used by Alchemite was developed by Dr Gareth Conduit whilst he was at TCM, and Dr Conduit is a co-founder of Cambridge-based Intellegens. TCM alumnus Dr Tom Whitehead also works for Intellegens.

12th December

TCM congratulates Dr Michele Simoncelli as he moves to start his own group at Columbia University, New York, as an assistant professor. There he will continue his computational and theoretical research into quantum transport phenomena in solids and liquids, and their applications to sustainable technologies, research which has already led to commercial collaborations. We are pleased too that he will continue to collaborate with TCM after he leaves.

21st November

TCM congratulates Prof Robert-Jan Slager as he moves to the Condensed Matter Group at the University of Manchester, where he becomes a Professor. We are delighted by his promotion, and also very pleased that he is maintaining his close links with TCM, where he still has postdocs and supervises PhD students, and he is visiting us frequently.

6th November

Many from TCM attended the annual Lennard Jones Centre Showcase Day. We particularly congratulate two of Dr Simoncelli's PhD students, Kamil Iwanowski for winning the best talk prize for his talk entitled "bond-network entropy controls thermal conductivity of coordination-disordered solids," and Bogdan Rajkov for winning the best poster prize for his poster on non-diffusive transport phenomena in solids.

29th October

TCM congratulates Bogdan Zviazhynski on a successful PhD viva. His research was on applying machine learning to extract information from noise, with applications including cancer detection. He will shortly leave TCM to join Squarepoint Capital in London as a Quantitative Researcher.

25th October

TCM congratulates Cecilie Glittum on winning one of the two annual American Physical Society GMAG awards for an Outstanding Dissertation in Magnetism. Cecilie has already moved to Germany to continue her research at the Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Energy and the Freie Universität Berlin.

We also congratulate her on her recent successful PhD viva.

9th October

Many congratulations to Dr John Jumper for being one of the recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Dr Jumper was an MPhil student in TCM in 2007/08, before returning to America to study for a PhD at the University of Chicago. He won the prize for his work in protein folding using machine learning, work he started at Chicago and then continued with the development of AlphaFold at DeepMind, a subsidary of Google.

2nd October

As the new academic year starts, TCM welcomes three new postdoctoral researchers, and nine new PhD students. We wish those moving on from TCM well for their futures. Most particularly we extend our good wishes to Prof Mike Payne who starts his retirement after over four decades in TCM, including many years as its Head of Group.

And we wish all in TCM a pleasant and productive year.

27th September

TCM congratulates Prof Andy Schofield on being named as the next Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Glasgow. Prof Schofield spent several years in TCM in the 1990s, when he was also a Research Fellow at Caius College. He left TCM to take up a post in the University of Birmingham, where he became a professor, then Head of School, then Pro Vice-Chancellor, before moving to become the Vice-Chancellor of Lancaster University in 2020.

19th September

TCM congratulates Balázs Póta on being awarded the best poster prize at the CECAM GAP/(M)ACE Developers & Users Meeting (machine-learned interatomic potentials) in Berlin. He presented on Thermal Conductivity Predictions with Foundation Atomistic Models, work done with his supervisor Dr Michele Simoncelli along with Prof Csányi and Dr Ahlawat. The work leverages foundation machine-learned potentials and the Wigner formulation of heat transport to improve the trade-off between computational cost and efficiency in current methods for designing heat-management materials.

23rd August

TCM congratulates Dr Nur Ünal on being awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. She will move to the Theoretical Physics Group at the University of Birmingham, to accept a proleptic Assistant Professorship, and to continue her research on novel geometrical, topological and dynamical phenomena in quantum systems. She will remain a visitor in TCM, and we hope that she will visit frequently.

22nd July

TCM supports the British Physics Olympiad, and congratulates the British participants on their return from the 2024 European Physics Olympiad in Kutaisi, Georgia. This year there was a joint training session for the German and British teams in Cambridge, to which TCM members contributed. We are delighted to report that individuals from both teams won gold medals.

Just like the International Physics Olympiad, the European Olympiad consists of a five-hour theory paper and a five-hour practical exam, and is for pre-University students. Countries sent teams of up to five individuals.

25th June

Five TCM researchers are amongst the international team which has just released OPTIMADE 1.2, described in Digital Discovery. This is an open-access database of material properties now containing over 27 million structures. It has a well-defined data structure enabling an increasing range automated queries and searches. This CECAM-funded resource is particularly useful for training AI models, including Intelligens' Alchemite. It is seeing growing use in many areas, including in developing corrosion-resistant metal alloys, catalysts and battery electrodes.

31st May

On 31st May, Dr Nigel Fleming came to TCM to unveil his sculpture entitled "The First Atom of the Universe II," which he dedicated to Prof Brian Josephson and donated to TCM. The sculpture is a very impressive addition to our Seminar Room, and will move with us to the new Cavendish next year.

2nd April

TCM congratulates Prof Sarah Teichmann, FRS, as she starts her new role as Professor of Stem Cell Medicine at the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. We are pleased that she will remain affiliated with TCM, and only a few miles away.

19th March

TCM congratulates Dr Clara Wanjura on receiving the annual thesis prize of the Atoms, Molecules, Quantum Optics and Photonics section of the German Physical Society (DPG). Her thesis is entitled "Non-Hermitian Topology and Directional Amplification in Driven-Dissipative Cavity Arrays." Clara is now working at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Erlangen.

5th March

This week (4th March) eight TCM members are in Minneapolis, joining over 13,000 Physicists at the APS March Meeting. Our attendees range from Professors giving invited talks (Prof Castelnovo, Dynamic Fractals in Spin Ice and Prof Cooper, Quantum oscillations in small-gap insulators) to first year PhD students (Kamil Iwanowski, Topological entropy controls thermal conductivity in disordered carbon polymorphs). Dr Sá will present Robustness of quantum chaos and dissipative phase transitions in nonunitary quantum circuits and Dr Simoncelli First-principles Wigner formulation of coupled radiative and conductive heat transfer, work done with a Master's student, Barnabé Ledoux, who was on an internship from the École Polytechnique. Cecilie Glittum will present both Doping-induced spin liquid in a pyrochlore ferromagnet and Sublattice pairing in pyrochlore Heisenberg antiferromagnets and Mircea Bejan will present Measurement-Induced Phase Transition in the Classical Simulability of Random Clifford+T Circuits. Dr Li Ern Chern will present A parton perspective on dipolar-octupolar pyrochlore magnets.

1st March

Dr Anton Souslov is part of the Executive Board of the new UK Metamaterials NetworkPlus which will launch in May, expanding on the existing UK Metamaterials Network. Metamaterials are structures comprised of multiple materials, with properties possessed by none of their constituents. The network will bring together experts from academia, industry, and governmental agencies, and support pilot projects. It has a £2.5m four-year EPSRC grant.

20th February

TCM congratulates Dr Adrien Bouhon as he leaves TCM to become an Assistant Professor at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. He will be based in the University of Stockholm, Sweden, where he will work on inverse problems in topological band structures and on the manifestations of their quantum geometry.

5th December

TCM congratulates Dr Michele Simoncelli on winning the 2023 Prize in Computational Physics from the Swiss Physical Society. The citation praises "his contributions to unifying the existing fundamentally different heat conduction theories in crystals and glasses," and his work will help to design new thermal insulators, including thermo-electric devices in which it is advantageous to combine good electrical conductivity with poor thermal conductivity.

4th November

In the latest edition of the Cavendish's People Doing Physics series, Dr Gareth Conduit discusses his career from Cambridge undergraduate to co-founder of Intellegens, including his development of machine learning methods to understand and design materials & chemicals.

Listen to the podcast..

27th October

TCM congratulates Gunnar Lange on a successful PhD viva. Gunnar is now working at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, continuing his research on band topology.

19th October

TCM congratulates Matthew Evans on a successful PhD viva. Matthew continues to work as a BEWARE Research Fellow at UCLouvain with Prof Gian-Marco Rignanese, whilst continuing to develop research data management software for experimentalists within the group of Prof Dame Clare Grey, FRS, in Chemistry.

11th October

TCM congratulates Kamil Iwanowski on winning the best poster prize at the Lennard-Jones Centre showcase day. His poster on "Heat Transport in Disordered Carbon: Unraveling the Link between Bond Topology and Thermal Conductivity" described his final-year undergraduate project with Prof Csányi and Dr Simoncelli. Kamil has started a PhD in TCM with Dr Simoncelli and Prof Payne, and in collaboration with the experimental group of Prof Sirringhaus.

1st October

As the new Academic Year commences, TCM welcomes Associate Professor Anton Souslov and Asssitant Professor Christoph Schran as new members of the Group. Dr Souslov researches on soft matter, and Dr Schran on computational atomistic simulation, especially of water.

We also welcome eight new PhD students and postdocs. We wish our joiners a pleasant and productive time in the Group, and wish those who recently left every success.

1st September

Innovate UK has awarded a £1.6m two-year grant to Intellegens and CPI to "develop a novel machine learning-driven tool to advance oligonucleotide-therapeutic characterisation and manufacturing."

This project will use Alchemite™, developed in TCM by Dr Gareth Conduit, to improve the productivity of manufacturing oligonucleotides. Oligonucleotides are a next-generation therapeutic, and have the potential to treat many diseases, but their synthesis is challenging.

21st July

TCM supports the British Physics Olympiad, and congratulates the British participants on their return from the 2023 International Physics Olympiad in Tokyo with three silver and two bronze medals. Dr Anson Cheung accompanied the team to Japan, Drs Gareth Conduit and John Biggins contributed to their training, and the BPhO website has been refreshed by Dr Michael Rutter.

Three of the above TCM members themselves won medals at the International Physics Olympiad when they were school-leavers.

4th July

TCM congratulates Dr Clara Wanjura on receiving the 2023 Sam Edwards Thesis Prize from the IoP's Theory of Condensed Matter Group for her work on Non-Hermitian Topology and Directional Amplification in Driven-Dissipative Cavity Arrays. The prize is for the thesis which "contributes most strongly to the advancement of theoretical condensed matter physics" and is open to all at institutions in the UK and Ireland. Clara is now working as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen.

24th June

TCM congratulates Drs Bartomeu Monserrat and John Biggins on on their recent successes in the University's annual academic promotions excercise. From 1st October 2023, they will both be Professors, a fitting recognition of their research and teaching excellence.

12th May

TCM congratulates Jonathan Nilsson Hallén on a successful viva. Jonathan will be spending the summer at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden where he will continue his research projects.

21st April

TCM congratulates Patrick Taylor on a successful viva. Patrick will move to become a postdoc in the Mechanical Engineering department at Imperial College where he will work with Dr Paul Hopper on using machine learning to detect defect formation during 3D printing of metals.

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.

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.