News archive
2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF)
14 December 2014
51st European High Pressure Research Group: EHPRG 2013
11 March 2013
Best way to rid a garden of snails revealed by QMUL scientist
16 May 2014
Gardeners wanting to rid their spring flowerbeds of pesky snails may have to ditch the beer traps and egg shells and revert to developing a strong throwing arm, according to new research co-authored by a physicist at Queen Mary University of London.
Congratulations to Dr Koji Yokoyama
27 October 2017
Congratulations to Dr Koji Yokoyama, one of our PDRAs working on the MuSES project with Alan Drew, who recently won the poster prize at the international conference on muon spin spectroscopy.
Dr Helen Duncan
27 October 2016
Congratulations to Dr Helen Duncan, who has been awarded her PhD for a thesis entitled Modelling local order in organic and metal-organic ferroic materials using the reverse Monte Carlo method and total neutron scattering, supervised by Dr Anthony Phillips and Prof. Martin Dove.
New Centre for Condensed Matter and Materials Physics
QMUL hosts CRIM 2013
25 June 2013
Two postdoctoral research assistant positions
27 October 2017
Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has two vacancies for 36 months for a Postdoctoral Research Assistants.
Liquid-like metals under pressure
18 November 2016
There is currently a surge of interest in mechanical behaviour of nanoscale systems with the aim to understand if metastability in a variety of materials can be achieved, explained and indeed exploited.
New insights into the glass transition
4 May 2011
What happens to a liquid when you cool it to obtain a glass? Despite the apparent simplicity of this question, understanding glass transition has defied the previous efforts of many theorists, and has become has become one of the "most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory", according to eminent scientists. This is particularly exciting because we now claim to understand such exotic states of matter such as superfluidity and superconductivity, yet cooling a liquid to obtain glass comes across as conceptually simple.
Local insight into electric ordering
10 November 2016
Hybrid perovskite analogues – materials that combine small organic ions with metals to create a framework structure – have important applications in fields ranging from solar power generation to computing and data storage.
Disordered and Nanoscale Materials
1 January 2016
Experiments Exploiting Central Facilities
4 January 2016
The centre makes considerable use of beams of radiation produced at national facilities such as ISIS and Diamond. ISIS generates beams of neutrons and muons, and Diamond is a synchrotron that produces high-intensity beams of electromagnetic radiation of x-ray wavelengths and larger.
Functional Materials
6 January 2016
Functional materials have physical and chemical properties that are sensitive to a change in their environment: for instance, they might depend on temperature, pressure, electric field, magnetic field and optical wavelength.
Dr Alston J. Misquitta
13 February 2019
Congratulations to Dr Alston J. Misquitta who has received an International Exchange Cost Share (with CNRS) grant of £10.8K from the Royal Society.
Professor Alan Drew
6 January 2019
Congratulations Prof Alan Drew who has received a £20k Global Challenges Research fund (GCRF).
Dr Jan Mol
27 October 2018
Dr Jan Mol has joined CCMMP as a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow.
Dr Kostya Trachenko
2 September 2018
Dr Kostya Trachenko has been awarded an EPSRC innovation acceleration award (£45,600).
Dr Andrei Sapelkin: Researcher Links Workshop grant 2019
30 April 2019
Congratulations to Dr Andrei Sapelkin who has received a Researcher Links Workshop grant of £49,536 from the British Council.
British Council Researcher Links Workshop 2019, SPA, 3-5 September 2019
26 August 2019
On 3-5 September 2019 Dr Andrei Sapelkin will be running the Researcher Links Workshop 2019 sponsored by the British Council. The workshop title is "Collective dynamics and pair correlations in atomic and colloidal systems across coupling regimes". The workshop will bring together top experts in the field of structure and dynamics in complex many-body systems.
STFC Highlights QMUL Research: Investigating hard carbons for battery materials
2 April 2020
Using the Materials Characterisation Lab, EMU, and computational modelling, two recent publications give an insight into the behaviour of ions inside hard carbons, when used for battery materials.
Using the specialised X-ray diffraction equipment at the Materials Characterisation Lab at ISIS (MCL), a collaboration involving scientists from the University of Surrey and three London universities has been able to investigate the effect of the different structures in hard carbons on ionic diffusion. Expanding on this with muon spectroscopy on EMU, they have also been able to test the materials after acting as an anode in a sodium-ion battery, explaining why these materials exhibit poor performance in practical testing
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CCMMP Research Highlights in Nature - part 1
13 January 2020
An iconic structure in London moonlights as a scientific tool
Physicists have made the most precise measurements ever of deformations in the shape of a wire. They did the experiment inside the 60-metre-tall column in central London known as the Monument — built in the 1670s to commemorate the city’s great fire of 1666.
Working at night, when the landmark is closed to tourists, Waris Ali at Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues hung a 50-metre-long wire down the shaft of the Monument’s spiral staircase. They then twisted and untwisted the wire from its bottom tip, and allowed it to come to rest again.
CCMMP Research Highlights in Nature - part 2
14 April 2020
How a chameleon gemstone changes from red to green
The gemstone alexandrite has the remarkable ability to change colour under different lighting. Now, scientists have found that this trick is an optical illusion that hinges on how humans perceive colour.
Alexandrite stones appear to be a brilliant emerald green in daylight, but a rich ruby red under candlelight. By measuring the light that the stones transmit, David Dunstan at Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues found that alexandrite’s chromium atoms absorb both yellow and blue light, leaving green and red light to reach a viewer’s eye. That helps to explain the gem’s green tones when illuminated by sunshine, which is dominated by green wavelengths.
Dr Jan Mol begins Future Leaders Fellowship
1 January 2020
Dr Jan Mol begun a Future Leaders fellowship in January 2020, funded by the
"The Future Leaders Fellowships will enable the most promising researchers and innovators to become leaders in their fields, working on subjects as diverse as climate change, dementia and quantum computing."
Dr Mark Baxendale gave a plenary lecture "Magnetic carbon nanotubes for biotechnology" at 17th International Symposium on Bioscience and Nanotechnology, Toyo University, Japan, 6 December 2019
Scientists discover just how runny a liquid can be
24 April 2020
Scientists from Queen Mary University of London and the Russian Academy of Sciences have found a limit to how runny a liquid can be.
Viscosity, the measure of how runny a fluid is, is a property that we experience daily when we fill a kettle, take a shower, pour cooking oil or move through air.
We know that liquids get thicker when cooled and runnier when heated, but how runny can a liquid ever get if we keep heating it?
Lei Tan selected to present at the ‘STEM for Britain’ exhibition
21 May 2020
Lei Tan has been selected to present a poster at the ‘STEM for Britain’ exhibition held in UK parliament on 9th March 2020.
First-Principles Many-Body Nonadditive Polarization Energies from Monomer and Dimer Calculations Only: A Case Study on Water
Rory A. J. Gilmore, Martin T. Dove, and Alston J. Misquitta
J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2020, 16, 224−242
In this paper from Rory's research work we have demonstrated how accurate many-body non-additive interaction models can be constructed for water in a general way that is applicable to other many-body molecular systems. Using the CamCASP code (https://app.ph.qmul.ac.uk/wiki/ajm:camcasp:start) and the iterated stockholder atoms algorithm and recent developments in SAPT(DFT) made here at QMUL, we have shown how these physics-based models can be constructed using a tiny fraction of the data normally used. We are now using these same ideas to make many-body models for larger, more complex systems together with Prof Sally Price from UCL in a collaboration funded by AWE.
European Fellowships
The Centre for Condensed Mater and Material Physics, part of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), welcomes Expressions of Interest for researchers to apply jointly with a QMUL host supervisor, to the European Commission’s 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual European Fellowship Scheme.
The article dealing with collective excitations (or "molecular dances") marks a successful collaboration between the Centre for Condensed Matter and Materials Physics and the Bauman Moscow State Technical University and Institute for High Pressure Physics RAS, also in Moscow.
Prof Kostya Trachenko awarded prestigious EPSRC-CCP Physics Prize
24 September 2020
Congratulations to Prof. Kostya Trachenko for receiving the EPSRC-CCP Physics Prize this year.