Levitated Nanophysics Group

Sneaking in right at the end of the year, Ronghao and Yugang have put out this extremely enjoyable paper: Talking with a ghost: semi-virtual coupled levitated oscillators. Well done to all the authors, including our 2025 KURF students!

Our work on multiparticle detection and cooling paper has been published in Nature Communications. We believe this will be very useful for people wanting to work with arrays of small objects. Next step – control 1000 particles at once! Congratulations Yugang and the whole team.

Our work on producing an extreme-temperature heat engine has been published in Physical Review Letters. This work has got a lot of attention for its crazy ten-million degree temperature, but the real scientific interest is in the dramatic thermal fluctuations and position dependent diffusion. Congratulations Molly and the whole team.

We’re excited to have Bianca join the team as a new PhD student, working on our thermodynamics / levitated computer projects.

Qiongyuan spoke at the workshop on macroscopic superposition of levitated systems at CQT, National University of Singapore.

James opened Orkney International Science Festival and also reprised The Quantum State of Us with poet Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan. It was so much fun! He learned a lot about carrots!

It was a pleasure to attend the inspiring Optical Trapping & Micromanipulation XXII conference at SPIE Optics + Photonics 2025. Joe gave an invited talk “Rotation of levitated particles for precision sensing” and James gave the talk “Neuromorphic detection and control of levitated microparticles”. We came back with a lot of ideas…

Welcome to Dean Seo and Anoushka Sinha, our King’s Undergraduate Research Fellows this Summer, who have done amazing work on our (frankly crazy) analogue computer project

Welcome to Claire Goodall (in red), who joined us for some work experience looking at rotating nanoparticles with Qiongyuan. She made amazing progress in just one week. We hope one day she will be back in our lab…

Welcome to Assistant Professor İlhan Candan, joining us from Dicle Üniversitesi in Türkiye, who is joining us for 3 months as a visiting Fellow.