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.
EPSRC Physical Sciences Showcase
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!
New promotional video
Check out this new promotional video for the research in our lab.
Optical cavities in the 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!
Micro-ion traps
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.
Continued collaboration with Janet Anders
We were visited by our long-term collaborator Prof. Janet Anders from the University of Exeter, to discuss non-white noise and extreme heat engines. We are excited to see what nanothermodynamics we can study in our Levitated Electromechanics experiment.
Lab opening!
We had our official lab opening today! This marks the opening of a new clean room, a quantum science lab and an attosecond physics lab at King’s. It’s exciting to be part of a growing physics department here in London.

James looking sheepish in front of the acting Principal.

We had cake!
Welcome James & Yugang
We’re excited to welcome Yugang Ren and James Sabin as Ph.D. students in our group. Yugang will be working on levitated electromechanics, James will be working on cavity optomechanics.
Generation |Y⟩ meeting – Quantum Millennials!
James was invited to join the Generation |Y⟩ initiative, of millennial quantum scientists starting their own research groups. It was an incredible meeting, with a huge amount of knowledge sharing and support.
First trapped nanorods!
Well done Yanhui & Maryam, first nanorods trapped in London! These silicon nanorods are 600nm lond and about 130nm in diameter.
The blue data shows the spectrum of a nanorod trapped by linearly polarized light, and the red data a spinning nanorod illuminated with circularly polarized light.