Levitated Nanophysics Group

We have had project “Doing More with Less” funded, which will explore the use of optical Orbital Angular Momentum for the control of levitated nanoparticles.

Here is a video interview of James by UCL Quantum, talking about both general and specific research:

As academia in the UK prepared to go on strike, we took at different approach in the group. Moving from microspheres to macrospheres, a great evening for our growing group!

We will have a new project entering the Quantum Workshop! KCL’s Arts 7 Intelligence programme has funded the creation of a mobile electrical trap, to explore our visual understanding of data, in collaboration with artist Steven Claydon. Watch this space….

Our review article Optomechanics with Levitated Particles has been published in Reports on Progress in Physics!

James Millen, Tania Monteiro, Robert Pettit & A. Nick Vamivakas
Reports on Progress in Physics 83, 026401 (2020)

The article “Levitated Nanoparticles for Microscopic Thermodynamics – A Review” written by Jan Gieseler and James has won the Best Paper of 2019 award in the journal Entropy. I hope it’s a useful resource for the community.

We were very excited to attend the EPSRC Showcase at the Institute of Physics. We were one of 11 exhibits chosen from the entire portfolio, and were fortunate to hear a lot about national strategic policy, from the people making it!

Check out this new promotional video for the research in our lab.

We have started building our first optical cavity in the Levitated Nanophysics lab. This will be used to cool the motion of silicon nanorods to the quantum level. Exciting stuff!

We are super excited to get our hands on these beautiful micro-ion traps. They have been created by the Sinclair group at NPL, who have entered into collaboration with us to produce miniaturised nanoparticle trapping technologies.