Levitated Nanophysics Group

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

Molly talked about our work on thermodynamics at the Brownian Motion 2025 conference at EPFL, Switzerland. She met the Christopher Jarzynski, who is about as big a celebrity as you can get in stochastic thermodynamics!

Fedor is joining us as a King’s Quantum PhD student, and will be working on making levitated nanoparticle systems ready for quantum technologies.

It was super-fun to do BBC CrowdScience (listen here). I was joined by Harry Cliff and Kanta Dihal to discuss “What on Earth is Quantum?”.

Well done to Sophie for winning the poster prize at the King’s Quantum Annual Symposium, with her poster Rotational Optomechanics. She presented to Professor Sir Peter Knight FRS, the architect of the UK’s national quantum programme.

Our team had a great time participating in World Quantum Day on April 14th, as part of the London Centre for Nanotechnology / King’s Quantum. There’s a write-up here. We had the most ludicrously huge screen to show of our beautiful levitated diamonds. Well done Joe, Jon & Qiongyuan!

Ronghao headed over to ISTA Austria, visiting our friends in the Waitukaitis group and attending the Charged Matter 2025 conference. He had many interesting conversations about our charged particle arrays and neuromorphic imaging.

We have two exciting PhD opportunities at the moment.

Firstly, we have our first project with the King’s Quantum mini-CDT in Applied Quantum Technologies, a project co-funded by industry to develop sensors from levitated nanoparticles. Apply Here to start in June 2025, but we recommend you contact James immediately if you are interested

Secondly, we’re looking for a student to work with levitated microparticles to understand and simulate microscopic phenomena. Apply Here to start in October 2025. The deadline is April 1st 2025, but we recommend you contact James earlier than this if you are interested.

New pre-print! Our long-awaited super-hot heat engine paper is live! Congratulations Molly & Jon, old friends Katie & Muddassar, and fantastic collaborators Federico & Janet.

We’re very excited to welcome Dr Qiongyuan Wu to our group, who will be working on our micro-thermodynamics experiments – our first ever theorist in the group.