Levitated Nanophysics Group

We’re very happy to welcome Zhenan Chen to the group as a PhD student. He will be working on our levitated quantum optomechanics experiments.

Congratulations to Katie for defending her thesis “Levitated Electromechanics for Probing Fundamental Physics”. Many thanks to Dr. Janet Anders & Professor Peter Barker for doing the examination.

Yanhui is the first PhD student to graduate from the group, with his thesis entitled “Rotational Optomechanics”. Many thanks to Dr. Dave Phillips (Exeter) and Dr. Michael Vanner (Imperial) for their thorough 3.5hr examination.

We’re thrilled to welcome Molly Message to our group as a PhD student, who will be working on our studies of nanothermodynamics in our electrical traps. She was previously a Masters’ student in the group, and worked on our Event Camera project.

After 3 years in the group, we were sad to say goodbye to Maryam this week. We wish her all the best in her new job at Alphasense and her surely stellar career in the future.

We are excited to share our work on using levitated particles to probe structured light, we have discovered a new type of optical angular momentum. Read all about it on arXiv.

Structured transverse orbital angular momentum probed by a levitated optomechanical sensor
Yanhui Hu et al.
arXiv:2209.09759

Congratulations to Yugang, Katie & Muddassar, and the three generations of Masters students who worked on this project!

Event-based imaging of levitated microparticles
Yugang Ren et al.,
Applied Physics Letters 121, 113506 (2022)

The group is lucky enough to welcome two King’s Undergraduate Research Fellows into the group this Summer. Coco is working on our public engagement project Seeing the Unthinkable, and Seraphine is exploring the potential to build hybrid nanoparticle control platforms.

We are pleased to share our work on event-based imaging of levitated nanoparticles! We believe this is an exciting new technology to leverage in the study of levitated systems, particularly for the study of multiple particles. It’s particularly gratifying that this work involves three generations of Masters students, and well done to Yugang for doing the work in the lab to get the paper into a publishable form.

You can read the paper here: Event-Based Imaging of Levitated Microparticles

We were interviewed about our collaboration with artist Steven Claydon by Stephanie Reed, you can read the article here: King’s Artists project combines quantum physics and art to explore the invisible.