Levitated Nanophysics Group

The Levitated Nanophysics group has kinda moved into a new room… while we await a shiny new lab we have moved into a temporary space. Yes, it is an office, yes it is huge, and it also has a kitchen, and carpet… still, science waits for no one!

James was pleased to be invited to just the most incredible conference in beautiful Benasque – Quantum Engineering of Levitated Systems. The entire levitated optomechanics community came together for the first time in a couple of years, to review our progress. And our progress has been incredible!

James was extremely pleased to finally make it to ICFO in Barcelona, to see the amazing nanophotonics experiments of Prof. Romain Quidant, to catch up with old colleagues and make new ones, and to give a talk on rotational optomechanics. Gràcies!

It was great to catch up with the UK photonics community at Photon 2018 in Birmingham. James was pleased to present some of his latest results on Rotational Optomechanics and Levitated Electromechanics.

James was honoured to talk about levitated nanophysics research at the launch event for King’s joining the London Centre for Nanotechnology. The great support which was shown, with attendance by the heads of King’s, UCL, Imperial, EPSRC and the Deputy Mayor for Business, points to many collaborations in the future!

2.5 year postdoc position in levitated electromechanics available, to start Jan 2019. Closing date: September 30th.

https://tinyurl.com/ycn48bc5

I am very pleased to announce that I am the fortunate recipient of an ERC Starting Grant – LeviTeQ, to develop the levitated optomechanics system as a platform for understanding fundamental physics.

I also received an EPSRC new Investigator Award – LevElectro, to expand my research into the electrical levitation of nanoparticles.

These are exciting times, and I will likely significantly update this website at some point in the near future.

Together with Jan Gieseler, I wrote a literature review of experiments where levitated nanoparticles are used to test thermodynamics on the nano-scale:

Levitated Nanoparticles for Microscopic Thermodynamics—A Review
J. Gieseler & J. Millen, Entropy 20, 326 (2018)

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve moved to King’s College London, as a Lecturer in Advanced Photonics. I will be continuing my research on rotational opto- and electro-mechanics.

New paper online! In this work, we propose a feasible experiment for measuring orientational revivals with a 50nm long cylinder. This is a purely quantum effect, arising from quantization of angular momentum, and interference of different orientations.

arXiv:1803.01778