Got around to building a little website for my new activity on quantum networking with Yb at @durhamqlm.bsky.social, funded by my EPSRC Quantum Technologies Career Acceleration Fellowship: durham-qlm.uk/research/tec...

Congratulations to Oliver Hughes on passing his viva. Thesis entitled "Preparation and Coherent Control of a Rydberg Qutrit in a Cold Atomic Ensemble". Supervised by @etotheipiequals.bsky.social and @kjweatherill.bsky.social Seen here with Stuart and internal examiner @ifanghughes.bsky.social

QLM is hiring! We're looking for a new Assistant Professor in QLM. This position is a theory position. Please find the job description below in this thread. For any academia-related queries, please contact Ifan Hughes ([email protected]). We look forward to receiving your application!

Hot off the press! Our @durhamqlm.bsky.social results in collaboration with group of @sonjafrankearnold.bsky.social in Glasgow have just been published. opg.optica.org/directpdfacc... Atoms, Iasers, big magnets and structured light. What's not to like?

A strong QLM presence at the recent @instituteofphysics.bsky.social QuAMP 2025 conference in Newcastle. In addition to many contributed talks, @kjweatherill.bsky.social gave an Invited talk "radiofrequency and terahertz sensing and imaging using Rydberg atoms". Both Maddie & Tom won Poster Prizes.

@matplotlib.org is getting more and more interactivity! "plotjs" converts any existing matplotlib charts to an interactive, web-based version of them, with quite a lot of customization options. Try it out here: github.com/y-sunflower/... More examples: y-sunflower.github.io/plotjs/

It's time! Join me in tracking this year's #Arctic sea ice minimum! Sea ice melt substantially slows every September as solar energy decreases and temperatures drop in the far north. Follow along with the data at zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-i...

Colored droplets in corn syrup seemingly blended together can be returned to their original state by reversing the direction of mixing, a form of laminar flow called "Stokes flow". Credit: UNM Physics & Astronomy

The measurement of CO2 on Mauna Loa began in 1958. In terms of duration, the quality of the data and impact, it is the greatest experiment in the history of science. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles...

How would you respond if your lab got destroyed by a missile? "I wish that a day will come very, very soon in which Iranian scientists and Israeli scientists will collaborate and work together and perform scientific research for the future of mankind." apnews.com/article/isra...

The largest number of climate stripes outfits in one place? @cycling4climate.bsky.social organise popular cycling and running events in the Netherlands for #ShowYourStripes day!

Imagine being Hasret Icsen. You pay $1,015/month for a 3-bedroom apartment in a green, mixed-income building full of amenities. When you touch your home, you're touching climate progress. This is Vienna's green social housing. As @NPR explains, we could do it here www.npr.org/2025/06/15/n...

I would love to think that everyone has known for a long time that LLMs aren't going to lead to "general intelligence," but all the evidence suggests there are plenty of people who resist this, so it's good to have a paper from researchers Apple making the point strongly.

🧪⚛️ There is a serious disagreement btw experiment and theory in understanding the ionization energy of a particularly excited state of helium. This is one to watch, though caution is always advised, as anomalies like this historically tend to go away. nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-pr...

New results! Visualizing strongly focused 3D light fields in an atomic vapor arxiv.org/abs/2506.01680 Performed with colleagues at @durhamqlm.bsky.social and @sonjafrankearnold.bsky.social Atoms, lasers, magnets and shaped light! 🧪 #physics ⚛️ #optics 💡

#PhysicsFactlet A Shack-Hartmann sensor is a simple and widely used device to measure the phase profile of a wavefront (aka "where the light is coming from"). A mini 🧵 1/ #Optics #Physics

The "Copernican Revolution" - the shift away from thinking that Earth sits at the centre of the universe - took ~200 years. Darwin's The Descent of Man was published in 1871. When will we complete the next revolution - of realising that we're bit players in nature even on Earth? Fig: Bar-On, 2018

Even if you don't care one bit about scientific research, it's important to recognise the value of publicly funding people working on very hard problems and training bright young minds on how to solve them.

On Friday 2nd May we held an event to celebrate 30 years since forming the experimental side of the QLM research section and former head of section @etotheipiequals.bsky.social special birthday. Here current head of section @ifanghughes.bsky.social is seen congratulating him.

Discussion on the philosophy behind our recent book on quantum optics. m.youtube.com/watch?v=9k5n...

1/2 21 March 1768: mathematician and physicist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was born. "The profound study of nature is the most fruitful source of mathematical discoveries." — Joseph Fourier A biography➡️ mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/... 🧪 ⚛️ #mathematicians #histsci

This is the last week of Fourier Optics course. We started with Fourier and his idea of building every function from plane waves. We saw some spatial filtering, temporal and spatial coherence, and discussed recent Nobel Prizes in physics. Quite a journey! 🧪 #physics ⚛️ #optics 💡 #iTeachPhysics 🎢

In this week's Fourier Optics course we consider the propagation and focusing of laser beams. 🧪 #physics ⚛️ #optics 💡 #iTeachPhysics 🎢

A common sin of scientific reporting is overstating the impact of research. It is always harmful when someone promises to solve the climate change with a quantum computer. The Microsoft press release news.microsoft.com/source/featu..., however, is especially cynical and bad. 1/2

This week's Fourier Optics course features coherence (temporal and spatial). My favourite image (@etotheipiequals.bsky.social) to illustrate these concepts is Young's double slits with white light. 🧪 #physics ⚛️ #optics 💡 #iTeachPhysics 🎢

This week's Fourier Optics course features time-dependent optical phenomena: slow light & fast light. We exploit the variation of refractive index close to an atomic resonance. From Chapter 7 of #opticsf2f written with colleague @etotheipiequals.bsky.social 🧪 #physics ⚛️ #optics 💡 #iTeachPhysics 🎢

In this week’s Fourier Optics course we shall be looking at optical phenomena in the time domain. Rather than looking at monochromatic light diffracting at different angles, we consider different colours propagating along the optical axis. 🧪 #physics ⚛️ #optics 💡 #iTeachPhysics 🎢

Approaching the 2-year mark. The collection of articles is about 100 now, most of them detailed long-form articles If you're interested in Python, do have a look. I'm quite proud of the collection and it humbles me that so many read it regularly And it's free… www.thepythoncodingstack.com

‪In this week’s Fourier Optics course we shall be looking at one of the key concepts of Fourier optics – how a lens performs a Fourier transform. The importance of f to f is explained. 🧪 #physics ⚛️ #optics 💡 #iTeachPhysics 🎢

In this week’s Fourier Optics course we shall be looking at diffraction from 2D apertures. A quiz to test your understanding of the array theorem. Can you match the apertures to their Fraunhofer diffraction patterns? 🧪 #physics ⚛️ #optics 💡 #iTeachPhysics 🎢

I did try to merge my current work with my past one once or twice. Indeed, this is by far the most wide-read of anything I’ve ever written, in large part because Google places it highly for many searches and several Universities use it as recommended reading thepythoncodingbook.com/2021/08/30/2...

You can make movies showing the evolution of the diffracted field as done by @jacopobertolotti.com in this #PhysicsFactlet bsky.app/profile/jaco...

In this week’s Fourier Optics course we shall be looking at diffraction. The central idea is: decompose an arbitrary light distribution in one plane into a sum of plane waves with Fourier transform to solve the Helmholtz equation for light propagation. 🧪 #physics ⚛️ #optics 💡 #iTeachPhysics 🎢

All the material for the Fourier Optics course this term is from set text #opticsf2f co-authored with colleague @etotheipiequals.bsky.social global.oup.com/academic/pro... Part of the PHYS3721 Modern Atomic and Optical Physics 3 module taught at Durham Physics.

Have your @matplotlib.bsky.social plots ever looked a little fuzzy or low-res in @projectjupyter.bsky.social notebooks? Try configuring matplotlib for retina displays with this command 🧪 %config InlineBackend.figure_format = 'retina'

Have to admit that this is very cool. arxiv.org/abs/2412.13164 It's time to dump your quantum stocks and buy shares in companies that make mattresses or any other kinds of springs or pendulums! Harmonic oscillators are soon going to fly off the shelves like NVIDIA cards!

Knock ! Knock ! My first post "The choice of problems is the primary determinant of what one accomplishes in science" John J. Hopfield Nobel Prize lecture...

An amazing 7882 people have now filled in Democracy for Sale's survey about money in politics. Can we make it 8,000?? democracyforsale.co.uk/safeguard Thanks!

Why just one MOT when you can have two? In Chromium-Lithium lab 6Li and 53Cr are captured in Magneto Optical Traps (MOT). Both are fermionic isotopes, and they are combined to investigate the physics of #ultracold fermionic mixtures. More on #CrLi team: quantumgases.lens.unifi.it/exp/crli

Since Steven Strogatz now has a special chapter on the Kuramoto model, this seems like a good time to retweet my movie of 4 metronomes synchronizing! Pantaleone's derivation of the Kuramoto model from the mechanics of the system is here: pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/art...

Very much looking forward to the Rochester lecture later this month. #physics #optics 🧪💡

To keep below 1.5°C, with a 50-50 chance, would require global CO2 emissions to be zero in ~2038 (orange line). The other scenarios (blue) overshoot to ~1.6°C before going back <1.5°C in 2100 (& they start with a global carbon price in 2020). 1/