Levitated Nanophysics Group

Congratulations Molly on passing your viva! And thank you to her examiners Prof Ian Ford and Prof Tracy Northup.

New work online! We continue our exploration into using levitated microparticles as a physical simulator of natural processes by studying the non-white source of noise known as Random Telegraph Noise. It was a heroic effort involving many generations of young scientists in the group, and beyond!

We are offering a fully funded PhD studentship to start in October 2026, on the development of inertial sensors from levitated microparticles. This is industry co-funded by QinetiQ. Feel free to get in touch with James if you are curious.

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Deadline: 1st April

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…