PSI Newsletter - The University of Manchester

Spring 2014
PSI Newsletter
Inside this issue:
1 iMagiMat takes centre stage at
the Conservative Conference
and wins award
2 Message from the Director
3 New ‘Fielding’ group in EPR
4 University researchers fly the
flag in Boston
4 Meet the new PSI Fellow
5 New developments in X-ray
correlation spectroscopy
6 Joint São Paulo - Campinas Manchester collaborationbuilding workshop
7 New published paper from the
PSI
8 Dave Binks elected to new
role at IOP
8 New studentship studying
metallic microstructures in
glass
8 Welcome Arno Crowe!
This newsletter consists of a
combination of articles,
highlighting both recent
professional successes and
iMagiMat takes centre stage at the
Conservative Conference and wins award
An innovative new device being developed by
Krikor Ozanyan and Patricia Scully from the
PSI and their fellow researchers from
Engineering and Nursing was exhibited in the
Innovation Zone at the Conservative party
conference in October 2013. The exhibits
were visited by Prime Minister David
Cameron, Foreign Secretary William Hague
and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, as well as
hundreds of conference delegates.
The iMagiMat is almost indistinguishable from a regular carpet
but can prevent falls in the elderly
iMagiMat, also known as ‘the magic carpet’, is an intelligent mat made up of
plastic optical fibres, laid on the underlay of a carpet. Conference-goers can see
how the optical fibres can bend when they tread on it and map in real-time their
walking patterns. iMagiMat maps 2D images by using light propagating in fibres
under the surface of the smart carpet. Compact electronics at the edges
measure and relay sensor signals to a computer. The signals are analysed to
show the footprint image and identify gradual changes in walking, or a sudden
incident such as a trip or fall, so a potential use for the carpet could be in nursing
and care homes.
The iMagiMat was nominated for the BioNow Innovative Aging award, and was
listed as runner up in November 2013. The team includes Krikor Ozanyan, Paul
Wright and Jose Cantoral Ceballos (EEE), Patricia Scully (CEAS) and Christine
Brown Wilson and Chris Todd (NMSW). Dr Patricia Scully (CEAS) and Dr Jose
Cantoral Ceballos (EEE) attended the awarded dinner on Thursday 28
November together with
Daniel Syder of UMIP to
represent the team.
those of a personal nature.
Please send any items you
have either for The Photon
Science Institute website or
the next newsletter to
PSIPA@manchester.ac.uk
Jose Cantoral Ceballos and
Patricia Scully at Bionow
Awards Dinner, where the
iMagiMat won the runnerup prize
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A Message from the Director
Welcome to 2014. This promises to be an exciting
and hectic year for the PSI. The main change that we
are all going to notice very soon is the arrival of the
£18M Multidisciplinary Characterisation
Facility (MCF), accompanied by other equipment
funded by EPSRC to around £6M.
Laboratory reorganisation
The building work to accommodate the MCF will
start in the middle of March. There will be disruption
on the ground floor, with the entrance to the building
opposite to the entrance to the Alan Turing building
sealed off for a period of months. The groups within
the large ground floor laboratory will also have to
perform a courtly dance to relocate the EPR facility in
the area at the west end of the building, with
Professor Andrew Murray’s experiments moving to
the area currently occupied by the EPR facility.
On the third floor we will lose the seminar room and
kitchen for a few months while the expansion space is
transformed and then occupied by the Henry Moseley
X-ray Imaging Facility. It will be an excellent addition
to have these very energetic photons joining the
Institute, and I believe there will be outstanding
opportunities to develop new experiments by
combining our existing strengths with those of our
colleagues from the School of Materials.
The MCF will also involve work on the 2nd floor. A new
environmental XPS will arrive and occupy half of a
laboratory on the 2nd floor. New and existing Raman
equipment will be added to our Raman facility, again
bringing new colleagues from Materials into the PSI
community. This later move will involve relocating one of
Professor Bruce Hamilton’s experiments.
Some other moves have already taken place. We welcome
BGT Materials (Drs Amanda Lewis, Liam Britnell and
Thanasis Georgiiou have already moved in); they are
building a graphene production facility in laboratory 2.308,
and as they establish their European operation in
Manchester their office area will expand. This will require
that the Electronics Workshop relocate to the Mechanical
Workshop. This move should take place in late February
or March.
Future
I have now been Director for almost five years, and it is
time for a change. The PSI has been transformed in five
years, with a huge range of new experiments moving in,
beginning with the National EPR Facility and Service,
through to the MCF. We will be jointly hosting a MarieCurie training site (with MIB) from September. New
activity probably represents something like £40M of new
experiments. We have excellent new research fellows who
have arrived since me, in Darren Graham, Alistair Fielding,
Publications with
PSI address
Fig 1. The dramatic increase in PSI publication output and influence
Citations with PSI
address
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Alex Jones and Ahsan Nazir.
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Director, but leadership from all academic staff, both
acting individually and working as a team. We contribute
Our publication performance has also improved
powerfully to major initiatives, and some of us lead such
dramatically. We are now publishing around 90 papers a
initiatives, for example Bruce Hamilton has led university
year, and in 2013 our work was cited > 1100 times:
efforts in developing new initiative in medical sensors,
This appears to be a strong position, however the
and Mark Dickinson is working very hard on microscopy.
citation performance remains patchy. Most of our
Academic research goes in cycles, and the current cycle
citations are for Raman spectroscopy of graphene, or
favours large-scale activities over small research groups.
the molecular magnetism and EPR group. Similarly our
Therefore research leadership is going to be essential as
papers in Science and the Nature group are based on
the PSI changes and continues to thrive. We have the
these activities. We need more groups to be performing capability to deliver leadership in photon science to the
to this level for the PSI to be a success. Citation
University of Manchester, and probably on a broader
performance is not everything, but it is an objective
stage, but we have not yet proven this assertion. Such
indicator and therefore far more valuable than subjective leadership is hugely time-consuming but the rewards are
opinion as a measure of how well we are doing. We
great. And given the remit of the PSI – to be a worldcannot ignore objective data and still claim to be
leading institute in photon science –
scientists. Everyone should be trying to publish in the
such leadership has to be part of our
very best journals in their field. Submitting to the best
activity.
journals will increase your rejection rates, but revising a
paper for a second journal really doesn’t take very long.
If you are trying the correct journals, about one in three
Richard Winpenny
of your papers should be rejected on first submission.
As the PSI moves forward leadership is going to be vital.
This isn’t merely the question of appointing a new
New “Fielding group” in EPR
A new EPR group is up and running,
based within the EPSRC National EPR
Research Facility and Service. The
group specializes in solving biological
problems and has students based in
both the Manchester Institute of
Biotechnology and the Michael Smith
Building. Given the prime location we
also have a number of PSI
collaborations concerning materials
science based projects.
Photo (from left to right) Abigail Shaw
(current MChem), Georgina Hewitt
(current MChem), Alistair Fielding (PI),
Graham Heaven (BBSRC DTP,
completed MChem University of
Manchester), Michael Hollas (EPSRC
DTA, completed MChem University of
Oxford), Maria Concilio (Bruker
Studentship, completed MPhil,
University of Manchester).
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University of Manchester researchers fly the flag in Boston
Dr Iain Crowe was selected to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston (one of the world's
top universities) as part of the M2EET MAHSC-MIT initiative in December 2013. Other researchers from the
University came from the Medical and Human Sciences, Life Sciences and the Engineering and Physical Sciences
faculties.
The purpose of this initiative was to facilitate the exchanging of ideas, expertise and interests to enhance
opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaboration with the ultimate goal being to facilitate development of young
investigators and create sustainable, mutually beneficial, cross-disciplinary collaborative partnership between
Manchester and MIT. Longer term, M2EET will act as a vehicle for leverage of external investment for new crossdisciplinary collaborative projects. The initial plan for the exchange is to enable 10 junior faculty (from clinical, life
sciences, engineering) selected throughout the MAHSC partner organisations to develop connections with MIT.
These new connections were celebrated over the two-day meeting in Boston on 4th/5th December.
As a result of Iain’s trip to Boston, he is now developing a collaboration with a group at MIT in photonic materials
for CMOS integrated light sources and bio-sensing applications, which he hopes will lead to high impact publications
and joint bids for funding in the near future.
You can read more about the initiative here: http://www.trustech.org.uk/news/m2eet/.
Meet the new PSI Fellow
By Ahsan Nazir
My research interests are based around understanding the delicate
interplay of quantum coherence and noise in open quantum
systems. I have developed a number of innovative methods to
model open quantum systems beyond common approximations,
and applied them in diverse areas ranging from solid-state quantum
information processing to quantum biology. By building on the idea
of redrawing the boundary between system and environment, I
now aim to develop an efficient framework in which to study both
the equilibrium and non-equilibrium dynamics of many-body open
quantum systems, beyond perturbative regimes. I shall use this
approach to explore a number of important problems in the
context of light-matter interactions in solid-state and biomolecular
systems, such as robust quantum state generation, biomolecular
energy transport, and solar energy conversion. The PSI offers an unprecedented opportunity for me to develop my
research alongside scientists at the top of their fields in a wholly multidisciplinary environment, and I am very much
looking forward to becoming an active member.
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New developments in X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy
a)
R_Batch_001_Frames_00000-09999 - collected Fri May 10 03:46:58 2013
intensity [photons/sec]
5.2
row no.
100
200
300
400
500
x 10
5
5
4.8
4.6
4.4
4.2
100
200
300
400
500
0
100
column no.
200
300
elapsed time [s]
Log10 scale of avg. image
row no.
100
200
300
400
500
100
200
300
400
500
column no.
b)
R_Batch_001_Frames_00000-09999 - collected Fri May 10 03:46:58 2013
-1
q=0.000252Å
3
g2
1.5
10
-1
10
0
10
1
10
2
10
-2
10
-1
 t [s]
1.3
10
1
10
1
-2
10
2
10
0
10
1
10
2
10
-1
10
-1
0
10
1
10
2
10
-1
10
0
10
-2
10
-1
1
10
10
2
 t [s]
10
1
10
2
-1
q=0.00321Å
g2
1.2
1.1
10
0
1.3
-1
g2
10
-1
q=0.00284Å
1
-2
2
 t [s]
1.2
1
10
1
-2
q=0.00246Å
1.1
1
q=0.00208Å
 t [s]
1.2
10
1.1
 t [s]
1.3
0
1.2
1.1
10
10
g2
g2
g2
-1
-1
1.3
-1
1
10
10
 t [s]
q=0.00171Å
1
g2
10
1.2
1.1
10
0
1.3
-1
q=0.00133Å
-2
1.2
 t [s]
1.2
10
q=0.000959Å
1.1
1.4
-2
-1
1.3
1.6
3.2
10
-1
q=0.000584Å
1.7
g2
g2
3.4
A team from the PSI (Tom Waigh, Alex Malm,
James Glackin) and a group from the Diamond
synchrotron (Christoph Rau, Ulrich Wagner) have
performed the UK’s first X-ray photon correlation
spectroscopy experiments on the coherence beam
line (I13). Visible wavelength photon correlation
spectroscopy (PCS) is a standard tool in photon
science laboratories all over the world. However,
many conventional PCS measurements are
obstructed by sample opacity (a slight cloudiness of
specimens can lead to artefacts due to multiple
scattering) and are only sensitive to relatively large
length scales (set by the diffraction limit). X-ray
PCS methods neatly circumvent these two
problems, since most materials are fairly
transparent to X-rays and their decreased
wavelength (~0.15 nm versus ~500 nm) gives
improved sensitivity to smaller length scales. As a
result XPCS provides access to time scales and
length scales that are not easily probed by any
other form of spectroscopy (~ms-1000s, ~1-1000
nm).
1.1
1
-2
10
-1
10
0
10
 t [s]
1
10
2
10
-2
10
-1
10
0
10
 t [s]
1
10
2
Initial experiments have probed the dynamics of
soft condensed matter systems (colloids in
glycerol), but a wide range of samples can in
principle be explored. Please contact Tom Waigh
(t.a.waigh@manchester.ac.uk) or the synchrotron
directly if you have a nanostructured fluid and
would like to explore its dynamics.
Figure 1. a) Static x-ray scattering from 540 nm silica colloids in glycerol measured on a two dimensional detector. b) XPCS correlation functions calculated from speckle patterns on the two dimensional detector (g2 , the radially averaged intensity correlation function as a function of time) from 9
separate radial q bins (another 9 q bins were collected, but are not shown). q is the momentum
q
transfer,
4

sin

2 , l is the wavelength (0.128 nm) and q is the scattering angle. The sample to
detector distance was 18 m. The XPCSGUI software correlator was a gift from Michael Sprung
(DESY).
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Joint São Paulo - Campinas - Manchester collaboration-building
workshop
By Wendy Flavell
Some of the workshop delegates; in the front row (L-R) are Antonio Domingues dos Santos (USP, in the
white shirt), Rene Nome (UNICAMP), Romulo Ando (USP), Koiti Araki (USP), Wendy Flavell (UoM),
Hermi Brito (USP), Pedro Camargo (USP), Marina Leontiadou (UoM) and Sarah Haigh (UoM).
The PSI recently hosted a party of Brazilian visitors from University of São Paulo (USP) and the State University of
Campinas (UNICAMP) for an interdisciplinary collaboration-building workshop, attended by around 45 delegates.
The three-day event at the end of January, took place in PSI and MIB (the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology),
and was supported by EPS Faculty and the PSI. The meeting focused on charge and energy transfer at surfaces, and
was organised by Wendy Flavell - with a great deal of help from Cassandra Kenny, Dave Binks and Pedro Camargo
(USP). Our guests gave up part of their summer holidays, braving appalling weather in Manchester (and a
temperature difference of around 32°C) to contribute to the meeting. We had some fantastically-productive
research discussions, so expect to see more news about Brazil soon.... but we think we might hold the next
conference somewhere warmer perhaps, Pedro?
More details, including the full programme and abstracts of the
talks can be found at
http://www.psi.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/seminars_and_events/
index.html
A lunchtime poster session
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New published papers from the PSI
A new book, Progress in Optics, 58, 978-0-444-62644-8 (2013) edited by Emil Wolfe
contains a contributed chapter on silicon photonics that Iain Crowe and Matthew
Halsall wrote in collaboration with colleagues from Imperial and McMaster University
(Canada). ISBN: 978-0-444-62644-8. A second article of theirs was published in High
Pressure Research on high pressure studies of carbon nanotubes with their
collaborators at Queen Mary University, London.
DOI: 10.1080/08957959.2013.878714
They also had a journal article published by the Journal of Applied Physics, describing
the probing of optically active Sm dopants in TiO2 using X-ray techniques, which was
carried out as part of a collaboration with colleagues from Japan (NIMS and U of Tokyo)
and Canada (Canadian Light Source (synchrotron facility) and UWO), and colleagues
Bruce Hamilton and Masashi Ishii. DOI: 10.1063/1.4824375.
Just recently, the same researchers have had a paper published in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, about
non-radiative recombination in Er doped Si nano-crystals during thermal quenching of intra-4f luminescence.
DOI: 10.7567/JJAP.53.031302
David Binks has had two papers published recently. “Multiple exciton
generation and ultrafast exciton dynamics in HgTe colloidal quantum
dots” by Ali Al-Otaify, Stephen V. Kershaw, Shuchi Gupta, Andrey L.
Rogach, Guy Allan, Christophe Delerue and David J. Binks (Phys.
Chem. Chem. Phys., 2013,15, 16864-16873) (DOI: 10.1039/
c3cp52574k) and also “Comparison of Solar Cells Sensitised by
CdTe/CdSe and CdSe/CdTe Core/Shell Colloidal Quantum Dots
with and without a CdS outer layer” by N. McElroy, R. Page, D.
Espinobarro-Velasquez, E. Lewis, S. Haigh, P. O’Brien and D. J. Binks.
(Thin Solid Films - in press.)
Mark Jackman (a NowNano PhD student) and Andrew Thomas have
published an experiment important to the development of dye-sensitised solar
cells. The paper reports on work carried out on beam line D1011 at Maxlab on
the effects of illumination of a di-substituted aromatic molecule with ultraviolet
and visible radiation and proposes a mechanism for the photocatalytic
degradation of the molecule. It also addresses the adsorption mode of the
molecule, in particular clarifying the nature of the amine-TiO2 surface bond
proposed in earlier work for aniline adsorption on this surface.
Mark J. Jackman and Andrew G. Thomas, J. Phys. Chem. C., in press. DOI: 10.1021/jp4103405
Patricia Scully and her colleagues at the University of Liverpool had had a paper published in Laser Physics
Journal, entitled: “NUV femtosecond laser inscription of volume Bragg gratings in poly (methyl) methacrylate with
linear and circular polarizations”. This paper explains how a spatial light modulator can be used to control the laser
inscription of photonic structures into transparent optical materials, in this case, polymers, and demonstrates that
several beams in parallel can be used to speed up the process. The work results from a 10 year collaboration with
Dr Walter Perrie, Senior Research Fellow at the Lairdside Laser Engineering Centre at The University of
Liverpool. DOI: 10.1088/1054-660X/23/12/126004
The Photon Science Institute
University of Manchester
Alan Turing building
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL
www.psi.manchester.ac.uk
The Photon Science Institute provides an
innovative and interdisciplinary environment for
research into and the application of photon science
- the understanding of how light interacts with
matter. The Institute fosters collaborations across
the physical, engineering, material, medical and
biological sciences to produce high-quality research
and knowledge transfer.
David Binks elected to new role at IOP
Dr Dave Binks has been elected as Chair of the Quantum Electronics and Photonics Group of the Institute of
Physics. Part of this role is being a Programme Chair for the Photon14 conference at Imperial College next
September.
Photon14 is the largest optics and photonics conference in the UK and the seventh in the series, following
Photon02 (Cardiff), Photon04 (Glasgow), Photon06 (Manchester), Photon08 (Edinburgh), Photon10 (Southampton)
and Photon12 (Durham). Photon14 will be held at Imperial College London and is an umbrella conference series
embracing both 'Optics and Photonics 2014' and 'QEP-21' and has a common social programme.
New studentship studying metallic microstructures in glass
A PhD studentship has been obtained through the President’s Doctoral
Scholarship Award and will be supervised by Patricia Scully and Med
Benyezzar. The project which starts by October 2014 concerns the
development of metallic microstructures in glass. It will be hosted
academically by the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Sciences
and will run in the Photon Science Institute. Silver nanoparticles embedded in
glass offer a number of unique opportunities for creating novel and functional
structures such as electronic components, waveguides, and microwires.
White light reflectometry image of a
This flagship funding scheme, which is strongly supported by the University's
micromachined glass surface using a
President and Vice Chancellor Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, offers over
PSI 100fs laser, 1 KHz repetition rate
ultrafast laser.
100 elite studentships each year and is underpinned by a core investment of
£2.5m over four years. The PDS Award will give the most outstanding
students from across the UK and from around the world a foundation to support research training with prominent
academics across a full range of subjects.
Welcome Arno Crowe!
And lastly, congratulations to Iain Crowe and his partner Noémie, who gave birth
to a fit and healthy son on 1st Oct 2013. The new arrival’s name is Arno Crowe,
and he and his mum did very well after the birth.
Baby Arno is now four months old...which means his parents might just get some
well-deserved rest.
Best wishes to the new family from everyone in the PSI!
A newborn baby Arno