Always good to be back in New Orleans … this time a couple of weeks after Mardi Gras. This year’s APS March meeting was an excellent success with the GSOFT focus group more visible than ever, and many great sessions in the GSOFT, DPOLY, DBIO, SPNP and other sections, including our own focus session “New Mesophase Symmetries and Topologies in Self-Assembled Soft Matter“.
Since the award of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”, topological effects are all the hype in condensed matter physics. In a new paper “Bragg-mirror-like circular dichroism in bio-inspired quadruple-gyroid 4srs nanostructures“, just published by the Nature Group journal Light: Science & Applications, we describe the experimental realisation of a photonic material that owes its amazing optical properties to a topological effect.
We are looking for a dedicated Phd-student for a joint project between Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, and the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The project requires applying for a Postgraduate Research Scholarship at Murdoch University in collaboration with the PhD supervisors.
Below is the abstract of an after-dinner speech I gave at the Australian Institute of Physics WA Branch annual general meeting and dinner, on 16 Nov 2016 (see also national AIP newsletter)
An old animation of mine, showing a bunch of falling spheres that fall into a jar. I’ve been meaning to put online for a while – here it is! Read more
Interested in undergraduate, honours or postgraduate studies in Maths or Physics (or other disciplines)? My home institution, the School of Engineering and Information Technology at Murdoch University, has current open rounds for undergraduate scholarships, honours scholarships and PhD scholarships, open to both Australian and international applicants. This includes scholarships for mid-year intake! If you’re interested, drop me an email (see here for contact details). Also check out our brand-new research brochure about what’s happening research-wise in the maths department at Murdoch, or the research brochure for the whole school.
“Women in Physics Day 2016” – a lecture by Italian-Romanian physicists Dr Catalina Curceanu, a panel discussion featuring some of Perth’s finest physicists and about 20 experiments on Bush Court including the ‘Walk on Water’ Non-Newtonian starch bath. Attendance with almost 600 high school kids well surpassed our wildest expectations. Need to do it again next year!
The flow of granular materials are relevant to any industrial transport process of particulate matter – from minerals and sand to powders and pharmaceutical pills. Flow phenomena of loose or compacted granular materials are also important on the geophysical scale, in landslides, dunes or erosion processes. This proposed PhD thesis project uses state-of-the-art simulation methods for simulating granular flows Read more
We hosted organised the 2016 Boden Research conference “Animal, Vegetal, Mineral”, held in Yallingup / Western Australia, from 19-23 Sept 2016, on the emergence and function of complex nanostructures in biological tissue and synthetic self-assembly. Here’s the final report and what attendees had to say about it: Read more
Congratulations to Matthias Saba for the successful defence of his PhD thesis “Photonic crystals with chirality — Group theory, algorithmic tools and experimental approaches for Gyroid-like photonic material” (see link) in December 2015.