physics phd at oxford

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Welcome to the pages for postgraduate students at oxford physics, current students.

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Current members can be found here .

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Transferable skills are an important part of your graduate studies. This section contains links to a number of courses that you may, in agreement with your supervisor, find relevant for your research and career.

Researcher Training Tool

The RTT (formerly the Graduate Academic Programme or GAP) is where you will find listings for many of the lectures and courses held by the department. It also holds information on courses held across the MPLS division which are open to Physics students. To access the RTT (requires you to use your Oxford SSO) please click here .

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Postgraduate students play an integral role in the demonstrating and teaching of undergraduate courses. The department holds a two day teaching training course at the start of Michaelmas term which is mandatory for all incoming second year graduate students or post-docs interested in teaching or demonstrating. Please keep an eye on your email in September if you are interested in this course.

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The MPLS site provides information about skills training taking place within the MPLS Division, and allows you to register for Divisional training courses, learn more about the skills framework, sign up to the Division's Facebook page, and get news updates on available skills training.

Oxford University's IT Learning Programme (ITLP) includes over 200 classroom-based and over 1000 online courses to help you in your studies, research, administration and future career.

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Within the Department, your supervisor, Director of Graduate Studies and Academic Administrator are all available to offer support. The Physics Graduate Liaison Committee provides a channel through which graduate students’ views and concerns can be brought to the attention of the Departmental Graduate Committee. The Department also has harassment advisers who can be found here . There is more information available on the University's equality page.

OUSU’s Student Advice Service also provides a confidential and impartial listening and advice service, and the University has a professionally staffed confidential Student Counselling Service for assistance with personal, emotional, social and academic problems.

There is an extensive framework of support for graduates within each college. Your college will allocate to you a College Advisor from among its Senior Members, usually in a cognate subject, who will arrange to see you from time to time and whom you may contact for additional advice and support on academic and other matters. In college you may also approach the Tutor for Graduates and/or the Senior Tutor for advice. The Tutor for Graduates is a fellow of the college with particular responsibility for the interests and welfare of graduate students. In some colleges, the Senior Tutor will also have the role of Tutor for Graduates. Each college will also have other named individuals who can offer individual advice.

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There are several opportunities available for networking both within the department and across the wider University. There are seminars and colloquia held regularly in term time throughout the Physics department, and many of these are open to all members of the Department. For details on upcoming seminars, keep an eye on your email or check the RTT on Weblearn.

The Department has an active Oxford Women in Physics Society , who aim to promote career development of women in physics while providing a welcoming support network. They hold regular networking and social events and can be found on Twitter and Facebook as well as around the Department.

Designing a Successful DPhil Workshop

A number of graduate students organised a workshop for graduate students this term on "Designing a Successful DPhil". The slides from this workshop contain a lot of useful information and resources for DPhil students, and can be found here .

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Abigail James

DPhil in Atomic and Laser Physics

Abigail James, DHil Atomic and Laser Physics

I am a current DPhil candidate in Prof. Norreys’ group and a member of Linacre College. My research is in the area of Plasma Wakefield Acceleration with a focus on imaging diagnostics and beam alignment techniques using reinforcement machine learning. I am a member of the AWAKE-UK consortium and the John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science.

I graduated from King’s College London with a masters degree in physics focusing on both particle physics and quantum field theory however my research project was with the Informatics department where I worked on multi-agent modelling with a view to understanding the effects of proprioception in continuum robotic systems. After this I spent a year in Australia at the University of Melbourne where I worked on machine learning applications to neuroimaging in acute stroke research.

I joined the University of Oxford in 2020 working in Ultracold Quantum Matter as part of a team developing cold atom sources for use in gravitational wave and dark matter detection using atom interferometry. In 2022 I joined the Norrey’s group under the AWAKE UK project to work on the development of an imaging diagnostic to identify information about the structure of Wakefield’s used in plasma acceleration.

My research focuses on the area of oblique angle Frequency Domain Holography (FDH) which uses photon acceleration to construct detailed images of relativistic objects in a plasma accelerator. Our diagnostic package includes novel injection methods for electron acceleration coupled with reinforcement learning techniques for maintaining beam alignment in more universal applications. I’m primarily interested in novel imaging and detection methods for accelerator physics.

As well as my research, I am an active science communicator, teaching physics using examples from science fiction and pop culture in an effort to close the gap between current research and the general public. My aim is help people connect with complicated topics and the scientific community as a whole. My TikTok channel, Pop Culture Scientist, has over 200K followers.

Email: [email protected] Oxford Physics Page: https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/coughlana

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DPhil (PhD) Theoretical Physics

1 in 20 applicants to this programme received an offer.

Data shown above is for entry in academic year 2023/24 (sources) .

Previous Years

Data sources.

• FOI Request by S.H Crozier. July 2016.
• FOI Request by Albert Warren. December 2019.
• FOI Request by AFW. December 2023.

The acceptance rate , or offer rate, represents the fraction of applicants who received an offer. Note that this will be generally lower the acceptances rates (acceptances divided by applicants) published by many other sources. This article explains it in more detail. The acceptances generally indicate the number of offer holders who accepted the offer and fulfilled its conditions. For some universities, however, it denotes the number of applicants who accepted the offer, regardless of whether they subsequently met its conditions.

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DPhil in Philosophy

The Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in Philosophy is a three- to four-year research programme in which a candidate undertakes a doctoral level research project under the guidance of a supervisor. The doctoral work culminates in a 75,000-word thesis that is defended in the form of a viva voce examination ( oral defence). Satisfactory progress through the DPhil is checked in the form of a mini- viva voce examination taking place at the end of the first and second year of study.

The aim of the Faculty’s DPhil in Philosophy is to prepare you for an academic career in philosophy.

For information on how to make an application please see our   Admissions Procedure and Entry Requirements page .

The Philosophy Graduate Studies Committee recommends progression from Oxford's BPhil in Philosophy to the DPhil programme in view of the opportunity it offers to students to study a wide range of philosophical topics as well as to focus on a narrower field of research interest. Students proceeding to the DPhil programme via the BPhil will normally write a DPhil thesis which is an expansion of their BPhil thesis, although this is not a formal requirement. Indeed, sometimes, the BPhil thesis topic is not suitable for expansion into a DPhil thesis, or a student may wish to write their DPhil thesis on a different topic.

Each year, some students are admitted to the DPhil in Philosophy from programmes other than the BPhil in Philosophy. These students enter the DPhil initially as Probationary Research Students (“PRS”) from appropriate programmes at Oxford or elsewhere. Typically, these students will have already completed substantial graduate work in philosophy, usually equivalent to that required for the BPhil. Students may also progress from a specialist MSt programme, for example from the MSt in Philosophy of Physics  or the MSt in Ancient Philosophy .

In the third term after enrolment onto the DPhil, you are required to complete a transfer of status from PRS to full DPhil status. Two appointed examiners will interview you both on your two-page thesis outline, which explains in outline the intended line of argument or contribution to the subject, and on a piece of written work of approximately 5,000 words in the area and philosophical style of the proposed thesis which is typically, though not necessarily, a draft chapter of the thesis. Students will also normally be expected to submit an additional essay of up to 5,000 words as part of their application to Transfer status, on a philosophical subject that differs from their doctoral research.

Students who progressed from the MSt in Philosophy of Physics course are required to write a 20,000-word thesis during their year as a PRS, as their MSt does not have a thesis element. Students who progress from the BPhil will enter the DPhil without being required to pass a year as a PRS and as a result will only have another six terms (instead of the usual nine terms) of fee liability for their DPhil.

At the end of the second year, you will be required to apply for confirmation of DPhil status. This entails an interview by one or two appointed examiners on your two-page thesis outline, which goes into some detail and comprises a reasoned statement of the nature of the proposed thesis together with a provisional table of contents, and a piece of written work of approximately 5,000 words.

You should have regular one-on-one tuition sessions with your supervisor(s). These will normally happen twice per term but in some terms, especially at the start of the degree and during the final stages of the thesis, the number of sessions may be increased. You are not required to attend any taught graduate classes as part of your DPhil degree, but you are encouraged to participate in lectures, classes, seminars and other educational opportunities offered throughout the university as relevant to your topic of study.

The course has no fieldwork, industrial placement or year abroad element, but you may decide to attend conferences, workshops or research training elsewhere.

Admission to the DPhil in Philosophy

Admission procedure an entry requirements.

For information on admissions to the DPhil in Philosophy please check the  Admissions Procedure and Entry Requirements page .

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Please find answers to frequently asked questions about admissions to the DPhil in Philosophy  here .

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For a detailed description of the entry requirements for the DPhil in Philosophy, please visit the DPhil in Philosophy page on the central university’s Graduate Admissions webpages.

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Oxford DPhil interview in Physics when your background is ridiculous

• Thread starter Wminus
• Start date Feb 16, 2017
• Tags Interview Physics
• Feb 16, 2017

A PF Molecule

• Physicists uncover new phenomena in fractional quantum Hall effects
• Researchers observe 'locked' electron pairs in a superconductor cuprate
• Theoretical research holds promise for advancing modular quantum information processing

A PF SuperCluster

I think you should focus on doing a clear presentation. Later on as interest heats up then talk about your desire to focus on your areas of interest. The best analogy I can think of is a sports one. If you're a striker in soccer who's really good at making goals but is getting tired of all the running who would now like to be a goalie and you get an interview for a team looking for a goalie. What should you do? I'd present my strength showing how I'd fake out goalies with various tricks to score and then say what the goalie could've done to thwart your winning tactics. The interviewers would see that you are adept in your field and that you might have something to offer in the position you are being interviewed for. However wait for others to comment on this as they may have more insight or have gone through this same scenario?  

jedishrfu said: I think you should focus on doing a clear presentation. Later on as interest heats up then talk about your desire to focus on your areas of interest. The best analogy I can think of is a sports one. If you're a striker in soccer who's really good at making goals but is getting tired of all the running who would now like to be a goalie and you get an interview for a team looking for a goalie. What should you do? I'd present my strength showing how I'd fake out goalies with various tricks to score and then say what the goalie could've done to thwart your winning tactics. The interviewers would see that you are adept in your field and that you might have something to offer in the position you are being interviewed for. However wait for others to comment on this as they may have more insight or have gone through this same scenario?

A PF Planet

Edward Whitten majored in History as an undergraduate - then went on into Mathematical Physics in graduate school. So it is not out of question to shift focus in Physics or any science for that matter. Answer: focus on what you know and what you able to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten  

A PF Singularity

jim mcnamara said: Edward Whitten majored in History as an undergraduate - then went on into Mathematical Physics in graduate school. So it is not out of question to shift focus in Physics or any science for that matter. Answer: focus on what you know and what you able to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten

OK guys I decided to just present my work as clearly as I can without worrying about it being relevant or not to the DPhil projects. I figure if they invited me to an interview, they must've read my CV, understood that I don't have any practical experience in quantum mechanics research and not thought too much of it. Thanks for your thoughts!  

Congratulations on the interviews. I definitely agree that you should concentrate on presenting your work clearly. The most important skill for a physicist is to understand and apply the principles of the topic. If you can do that, transferring to a different field is unlikely to be an issue. Of course you should expect some questions in the latter part of the interview on the field you are applying for but they will probably just be probing to find out how much you know. I suggest coming up with a good and consistent answer to 'why are you interested in this field?' and think of any obvious questions that could arise from that reason. E.g. 'I'm interested in the novel problems quantum computing can solve.' 'OK. What problems are those and how does a quantum approach solve them?'  

Excellent advice. Also review your resume and be prepared for questions on projects, gaps, and knowledge. Have short concise answers at the ready to limit discussion.  

• Feb 17, 2017

Make sure YOU ask questions. They will want to make sure you are really interested in the position and the research you would potentially be doing. Do a bit of research, look at the webpages of the groups and have a look at some recent publications; no one will be expecting you to understand everything but you will make a much better impression if come across as genuinely interested. Just do double-check; the interviews are for straightforward DPhils in groups at Oxford, right? Not one of the DTCs (I don't think there is a quantum DTC in Oxford)? Also, are these experimental or theoretical groups (I assume the latter is theory)?  

f95toli said: Make sure YOU ask questions. They will want to make sure you are really interested in the position and the research you would potentially be doing. Do a bit of research, look at the webpages of the groups and have a look at some recent publications; no one will be expecting you to understand everything but you will make a much better impression if come across as genuinely interested.

Just do double-check; the interviews are for straightforward DPhils in groups at Oxford, right? Not one of the DTCs (I don't think there is a quantum DTC in Oxford)? Also, are these experimental or theoretical groups (I assume the latter is theory)?

• Feb 19, 2017

Guys, when they ask me " Why Oxford, why here", how would it sound if I answered something like "Oxford is well known for its entrepreneurial climate and for having a quantum tech community that's not only among the best in the world, but also has strong ties with industry. I hope that a PhD/DPhil from here would allow me to get my foot into do the door of a very exciting community and hence open opportunities in a field I find exciting, as well as teach me skills that will be in high demand in industry. Further, I find the project both personally interesting and good career-wise, because of XYZ" ? Even though I've always enjoyed quantum physics, I'm not really keen on staying in academia, I'd much rather get into the quantum tech industry while it's still in its infancy + get a safe brandname on my CV (it's shallow, but that's how the world works). Do career-academics typically view this kind of mentality as a red flag, or they don't care as long as the work gets done on time? Neither of the professors in the committee appear to concern themselves on whether their research has commercial potential or not, from what I've read.  

I'm not sure but this doesn't seem like a great approach. First, I'm not even sure Oxford is 'well known for it's entrepreneurial climate' or if many academics there are highly aware of it. Second, talking about leaving before joining could come across as a bit presumptuous. I suggest just focusing on motifs like 'world class research', 'high calibre researchers' and 'exciting projects'. If you can give an example of an important publication as an example that will give you more authenticity e.g. 'I found the work x highly inspiring and I want to contribute to more of the same' . Often the primary interest of academics is 'are you going to create publishable output' because that's how they are assessed and that affects funding.  

reasonableman said: I'm not sure but this doesn't seem like a great approach. First, I'm not even sure Oxford is 'well known for it's entrepreneurial climate' or if many academics there are highly aware of it. Second, talking about leaving before joining could come across as a bit presumptuous. I suggest just focusing on motifs like 'world class research', 'high calibre researchers' and 'exciting projects'. If you can give an example of an important publication as an example that will give you more authenticity e.g. 'I found the work x highly inspiring and I want to contribute to more of the same' . Often the primary interest of academics is 'are you going to create publishable output' because that's how they are assessed and that affects funding.

Wminus said: But wouldn't you say Oxford is at least prominent in the UK in its connections with industry..? Oxford university start-up fund boosted by £230m ... - Financial Times http://nqit.ox.ac.uk

• Feb 20, 2017

Also, you wouldn't be be doing you DPhil in Oxford a such; you would be doing it in a research group and a supervisor that happens to be based in Oxford . Remember that the system in the UK is VERY different from that in the US in that you won't be going to a "school" at all (especially if you are not going the DTC route) You will be spending your whole time working in a research group and will -generally speaking- not interact much with other people at the university (professionally that is). Hence, what happens at the rest of the university will largely be irrelevant to your experience. Which group you are working in and who is your supervisor is much more important than the university. Hence, I would suggest focusing on why you think the GROUP (and their research) would be a good fit, rather than blanket statements about the university as a whole. It could very well be that your potential supervisor has not connections whatsoever to industry (which is VERY likely to be the case here since you are looking at the "quantum" area),  

• Mar 6, 2017

Dear all, Here's the after action report, in case somebody on this forum will end up in my shoes in the future: 1st interview on Computational Physics project in theory group based in Atomic & Laser Physics department : After the presentation, 50% of the questions were based on my presentation (which I answered well) and the other 50% were totally unrelated to both the presentation and the research project I wanted to do; they were on atomic physics & laser physics (duh). So they drilled me on Atomic Physics because I took a course 1 year ago in Quantum Optics + because the theory group I wanted to join is nominally based in the atomic & laser physics department. The questions I got was stuff like "What are the physical realisations of the "3" possible "spin" levels of a photon?" (trick question) and "what can you tell me about electron transition rules"? I was completely unprepared for this and couldn't remember the Quantum Optics material I learned a year ago on the fly, since I prepared myself beforehand for questions relevant to the project (ie many-body physics, theory behind quantum mechanics, tensors), and so it went pretty badly. Result : The supervisor informally told me I'm likely to get only an unfunded DPhil offer, but as a consolation price he offered me a paid (research assistant salary level 6) 1-year research internship in his group (which was quite generous of him, considering my performance). 2nd interview on Quantum Electronics/Computing Projects in a experimental group based in Materials department : After the previous nightmare-interview, I essentially spent every free evening I had reading up on the details of solid state physics, quantum information, physical working principles on quantum computers etc. When the panel interview came, I was well prepared and answered everything. The questions were stuff like "pretend I'm a 2nd year undergrad. Explain the density matrix to me" and "What is a quantum computer and how does it work?" and "Why this group, why these project" and "I see you did a research placement at X. Tell me about it". After the interview, they emailed me an electrostatics problem that "should take at most half a day to solve" along with a few scanned pages from Jackson's electrodynamics book. Result : Strong indicators of interests from one of the supervisors, and interest from a couple of others. Basically I'm very confident that I'll get an offer from at least one of them, but the funding situation is uncertain because I'm from the EEA => in the gray-area between "overseas" status and "home/EU" status as far as tuition is concerned. Keeping fingers crossed.  

• Mar 25, 2017

Alright guys, so I've located funding (mix of scholarship & zero-interest loan) and am in the position to accept the DPhil offer in department of Materials, where I'll do research in Quantum Computing. However, as I mentioned above, I've also been accepted to a 1-year research internship. I'm thinking I should try to get the DPhil offer deferred 1 year and do the internship, as it'd be nice to earn some serious money for once and take it easy a bit before the Doctorate. Is it polite to ask for a deferral, or do you guys think the professors in charge of the DPhil are liable to get pissed if I ask for it? IMO, doing the internship would be good for both me and them, as I'd get professional training in research & software engineering and hence be better prepared for the DPhil.  

• Mar 27, 2017

Wminus said: Is it polite to ask for a deferral, or do you guys think the professors in charge of the DPhil are liable to get pissed if I ask for it? IMO, doing the internship would be good for both me and them, as I'd get professional training in research & software engineering and hence be better prepared for the DPhil.

• Mar 28, 2017

f95toli said: You could always ask, but I would be surprised if he agrees. It is important to remember that whereas your primary goal is to get a PhD, his primary goal is to hire someone who can work in one of his projects and help him deliver projects. The mindset is important here: whereas you will technically be a student, doing a PhD is essentially a job; having a PhD student costs both a lot of time and money (even if you are self funded; there are still overheads and other costs associated with the project itself) and the only reason anyone would have a student is therefore because they need someone to work on a specific project. Hence, there is a pretty good chance that he needs a student NOW and not next year. Next year there might not even be a suitable project for you to work on.

Related to Oxford DPhil interview in Physics when your background is ridiculous

What is the format of the oxford dphil interview in physics.

The Oxford DPhil interview in Physics typically consists of multiple short interviews with faculty members and a longer interview with potential supervisors. There may also be written or practical components to the interview.

What type of questions can I expect during the interview?

The questions asked during the Oxford DPhil interview in Physics will vary depending on your research interests and background. However, common topics include your previous research experience, your understanding of fundamental physics concepts, and your potential research proposal.

How should I prepare for the interview if my background in Physics is not strong?

If your background in Physics is not strong, it is important to focus on understanding fundamental concepts and being able to explain your research interests and potential proposal clearly. Additionally, familiarize yourself with the research of potential supervisors and the current research being conducted at Oxford in your field.

What should I wear to the interview?

The dress code for the Oxford DPhil interview in Physics is typically smart casual. This means dressing professionally but not necessarily in a suit and tie. It is important to be comfortable and confident in your attire.

What are some common mistakes to avoid during the interview?

Some common mistakes to avoid during the Oxford DPhil interview in Physics include not researching the department and potential supervisors beforehand, being unprepared to discuss your research interests and potential proposal, and not asking thoughtful questions about the program and department. It is also important to remain calm and confident during the interview.

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What is a dphil.

A DPhil is Oxford's name for a PhD - a higher research degree which allows you to make an original contribution to mathematics in the form of a thesis. A DPhil takes three to four years to complete. During your DPhil, you will be supervised by at least one academic, although some students will have more than one supervisor (particularly if they are working across disciplines). Unlike CDT courses (and PhDs in other countries), you will begin to do research straight away and there is no prescribed taught component. However, you are very welcome to attend seminars and you can choose from a wide variety of taught courses and skills training to enhance your broader mathematical knowledge and develop your career. There may also be journal clubs or seminar series specific to your area of study. If you enjoy doing mathematics, and would like to be part of a lively and world-class research institute, then you should take a look at our research groups to see if they align with your own interests. 

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• 4th March 2025

Please apply by the 8th January deadline to be considered for available University-administered or Departmental scholarships. 

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The Martingale Foundation awards fully funded Scholarships for postgraduate degrees in the mathematical sciences at research universities in the UK. 

Tuition fees and research expenses are fully covered, and Scholars receive a tax free living wage stipend. Martingale Scholars also receive access to leadership and career develop through a multi-year programme of training and support. Visit the Martingale website for more information.  

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Oxford-Maryam Mirzakhani Scholarship

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SOLAR BREAKTHROUGH HERALDS ENERGY REVOLUTION

New solar technology will make everyday objects a source of energy

Published: 13 August 2024

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Scientists at Oxford University Physics Department have developed a revolutionary approach which could generate increasing amounts of solar electricity without the need for silicon-based solar panels. Instead, their innovation works by coating a new power-generating material onto the surfaces of everyday objects like rucksacks, cars, and mobile phones.

Their new light-absorbing material is, for the first time, thin and flexible enough to apply to the surface of almost any building or common object. Using a pioneering technique developed in Oxford, which stacks multiple light-absorbing layers into one solar cell, they have harnessed a wider range of the light spectrum, allowing more power to be generated from the same amount of sunlight.

This ultra-thin material, using this so-called multi-junction approach, has now been independently certified to deliver over 27% energy efficiency, for the first time matching the performance of traditional, single-layer, energy-generating materials known as silicon photovoltaics. Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), gave its certification prior to publication of the researchers’ scientific study later this year.

'During just five years experimenting with our stacking or multi-junction approach we have raised power conversion efficiency from around 6% to over 27%, close to the limits of what single-layer photovoltaics can achieve today,' said Dr Shuaifeng Hu Post Doctoral Fellow at Oxford University Physics. 'We believe that, over time, this approach could enable the photovoltaic devices to achieve far greater efficiencies, exceeding 45%.'

This compares with around 22% energy efficiency from solar panels today (meaning they convert around 22% of the energy in sunlight), but the versatility of the new ultra-thin and flexible material is also key. At just over one micron thick, it is almost 150 times thinner than a silicon wafer. Unlike existing photovoltaics, generally applied to silicon panels, this can be applied to almost any surface.

'By using new materials which can be applied as a coating, we’ve shown we can replicate and out-perform silicon whilst also gaining flexibility. This is important because it promises more solar power without the need for so many silicon-based panels or specially-built solar farms,' said , Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions Postdoc Fellow at Oxford University Physics.

The researchers believe their approach will continue to reduce the cost of solar and also make it the most sustainable form of renewable energy. Since 2010, the global average cost of solar electricity has fallen by almost 90%,  making it almost a third cheaper than that generated from fossil fuels. Innovations promise additional cost savings as new materials, like thin-film perovskite, reduce the need for silicon panels and purpose-built solar farms.

'We can envisage perovskite coatings being applied to broader types of surface to generate cheap solar power, such as the roof of cars and buildings and even the backs of mobile phones. If more solar energy can be generated in this way, we can foresee less need in the longer term to use silicon panels or build more and more solar farms', Dr Wang added.

The researchers are among 40 scientists working on photovoltaics led by Professor of Renewable Energy Henry Snaith  at Oxford University Physics Department. Their pioneering work in photovoltaics and especially the use of thin-film perovskite began around a decade ago and benefits from a bespoke, robotic laboratory.

Their work has strong commercial potential and has already started to feed through into applications across the utilities, construction, and car manufacturing industries.

Oxford PV, a UK company spun out of Oxford University Physics in 2010 by co-founder and chief scientific officer Professor Henry Snaith (shown, left) to commercialise perovskite photovoltaics, recently started large-scale manufacturing of perovskite photovoltaics at its factory in Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, near Berlin, Germany. This is the world’s first volume manufacturing line for ‘perovskite-on-silicon’ tandem solar cells.

'We originally looked at UK sites to start manufacturing but the government has yet to match the fiscal and commercial incentives on offer in other parts of Europe and the United States,' Professor Snaith said. 'Thus far the UK has thought about solar energy purely in terms of building new solar farms, but the real growth will come from commercialising innovations – we very much hope that the newly-created British Energy will direct its attention to this.'

'The latest innovations in solar materials and techniques demonstrated in our labs could become a platform for a new industry, manufacturing materials to generate solar energy more sustainably and cheaply by using existing buildings, vehicles, and objects,' Professor Snaith added.

'Supplying these materials will be a fast-growth new industry in the global green economy and we have shown that the UK is innovating and leading the way scientifically. However, without new incentives and a better pathway to convert this innovation into manufacturing the UK will miss the opportunity to lead this new global industry,' Professor Snaith added.

About Oxford University Physics 

Oxford University Physics  is one of the largest physics departments in the world, top-ranked in the UK and among the lead research universities globally in all key areas of physics (currently number 3 in the QS World Rankings 2024). Its mission is to apply the transformative power of physics to the foremost scientific problems and educate the next generation of physicists as well as to promote innovation and public engagement with physics.

Oxford University Physics leads ground-breaking scientific research across a wide spectrum of challenges: from quantum computing, quantum materials and quantum matter to space missions and observation; from climate science to the development of next-generation technologies for renewable energy; and from designing experiments to understand the nature of existence to revolutionising medicine and healthcare through biophysics. 

Oxford University Physics has spun out 18 companies since launching the University’s first commercial venture in 1959 and works with enterprises across most areas of its leading scientific research. 

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When the lights turned on in the universe

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Watching crowds of people hustle along Massachusetts Avenue from her window seat in MIT’s student center, Dominika Ďurovčíková has just one wish.

“What I would really like to do is convince a city to shut down their lights completely, apart from hospitals or whatever else needs them, just for an hour,” she says. “Let people see the Milky Way, or the stars. It influences you. You realize there’s something more than your everyday struggles.”

Even with a lifetime of gazing into the cosmos under her belt — with the last few years spent pursuing a PhD with professors Anna-Christina Eilers and Robert Simcoe at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research — she still believes in the power of looking up at the night sky with the naked eye.

Most of the time, however, she’s using tools a lot more powerful than that. The James Webb Space Telescope has begun providing rich data from bodies at the very edge of the universe, exactly where she wants to be looking. With data from the JSWT and the ground-based Magellan telescopes in Chile, Ďurovčíková is on the hunt for distant quasars — ancient, supermassive black holes that emit intense amounts of light — and the farther away they are, the more information they provide about the very early universe.

“These objects are really, really bright, and that means that they’re really useful for studying the universe from very far away,” she says. “They’re like beacons from the past that you can still see, and they can tell you something about the universe at that stage. It’s almost like archaeology.”

Her recent research has focused on what’s known as the Epoch of Reionization. It’s the period of time when the radiation from quasars, stars, galaxies and other light-emitting bodies were able to penetrate through the dark clouds of hydrogen atoms left over from the Big Bang, and shine their light through space.

“Reionization was a phase transition where all the stuff around galaxies suddenly became transparent,” she says. “Finally, we could see light that was otherwise absorbed by neutral hydrogen.”

One of her goals is to help discover what caused the reionization process to start in the first place. While the astrophysical community has determined a loose time frame, there are many unanswered questions surrounding the Epoch of Reionization, and she hopes her quasar research can help solve some of them.

“The grand hope is that if you know the timing of reionization, that can inform you about the sources that caused it in the first place,” she says. “We’re not quite there, but looking at quasars could be a way to do it.”

Time and distance on a cosmic scale

The quasars that Ďurovčíková has been most interested in are classified as “high-redshift.” Redshift is a measure of how much a wave’s frequency has decreased, and in an astrophysical context, it can be used to determine how long a wave of light has been traveling and how far away its source is, while accounting for the expansion of the universe.

“The higher the redshift, the closer to the beginning of the universe you get,” Ďurovčíková explains.

Research has shown that reionization began roughly 150 million years after the Big Bang, and approximately 850 million years after that, the dark hydrogen clouds that made up the “intergalactic medium,” or IGM, were fully ionized.

For her most recent paper, Ďurovčíková examined a set of 18 quasars whose light began traveling between approximately 770 million and 950 million years after the Big Bang. She and her collaborators, including scientists from four different countries, sorted the quasars into three “bins” based on distance, to compare the amount of neutral hydrogen in the IGM at different epochs. These amounts helped refine the timing of reionization and confirmed that data from quasars are consistent with data from other types of bodies.

“The story we have so far,” Ďurovčíková says, “is that at some point by redshift 5 or 6, the stuff in between galaxies was overall ionized. However, it’s not clear what type of star or what type of galaxy is more responsible for this global phase transition, which affected the whole universe.”

A closely related facet of her research — and one she’s planning on exploring further as she composes her thesis — is on how these quasars came to be in the first place. They’re so old, and so massive, that they challenge the current conceptions of how old the universe is. The light they generate comes from the immense gravitational force they exert on the plasma they absorb, and if they were already large enough to do that billions of years ago, just how long ago did they start forming?

“These black holes seem to be too massive to be grown in the time that their spectra seem to indicate,” she says. “Is there something in our way that’s obscuring the rest of the growth? We’re looking at different methods to measure their lifetime.”

Eyes towards the stars, feet grounded on Earth

In the meantime, Ďurovčíková is also working to encourage the next generation of astrophysicists. She says she was fortunate to have encouraging parents and mentors who showed her academic and career paths she hadn’t even considered, and she co-founded a nonprofit organization called Encouraging Women Across All Borders to do the same for students across the globe.

“In your life, you will see a lot of doors,” she says. “There’s doors that you’ll see are open, and there’s doors you’ll see are closed. The biggest tragedy, though, is that there are so many doors that you don’t even know exist.”

She knows the feeling all too well. Growing up in Slovakia meant the primary options were attending university in either Bratislava, the capital, or Prague, in the neighboring Czech Republic. Her love of math and physics inspired her to enroll in the International Baccalaureate program, however, and it was in that program that she met a teacher, named Eva Žitná, who “planted the seeds” that eventually sent her to Oxford for a four-year master’s program.

“Just being in the IB program environment started to open up these possibilities I had not considered before,” she says. “Both my parents and I started talking to Žitná about how this could be an interesting possibility, and somehow one thing led to another.”

While she takes great pleasure in guiding students along the same path she once took, equally as rewarding for her are the moments when she can see people realizing just how big the universe is. As a co-director of the MIT Astrogazers, she has witnessed many such moments. She remembers handing out eclipse glasses at the Cambridge Science Festival in preparation for last October’s partial solar eclipse, and recalls kids and adults alike with their necks craned upward, sharing the same look of wonder on their faces.

“The reason I care is because we all get caught up in small things in life very easily,” she says. “The traffic sucks. The T isn’t working. Then, you look up at the sky and you realize there’s something much more beautiful and much bigger than all these little things.”

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Four new faculty hires are a quantum leap for experimental physics

New assistant professors cement UC Berkeley's leadership in quantum science and technology

By Robert Sanders

Courtesy of Department of Physics

August 1, 2024

Already known as a leader in quantum science and a testbed for quantum computing, the University of California, Berkeley, is expanding its footprint with the hiring of four early-career experimental physicists who use quantum systems to explore new frontiers in physics.

The new assistant professors of physics will augment a wide range of quantum research already underway in the departments of physics, chemistry and engineering, much of it in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They will arrive within the next year and will leverage the weird quantum properties of atoms and light to make sensitive detectors or improve quantum computing and networking.

Chiara Pancaldo Salemi , for example, employs the quantum properties of superconducting circuits to search for dark matter particles called axions. Aziza Suleymanzade is using entangled photons in optical fibers to network quantum computers. Victoria Xu squeezes light to improve detection of gravitational waves. And Harry Levine entangles trapped neutral atoms to explore new types of qubits and reduce the noise in today’s quantum computers.

“It’s highly unusual to hire four experimentalists in one year, especially considering the high cost of startup research support and lab renovation, so this is a real statement that Berkeley is committed to the emerging field of quantum information science and technology,” said Steven Kahn, dean of mathematical and physical sciences in UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science and a professor of physics and astronomy. “These are the best young people in this super-exciting field. Each of them had multiple offers from competing institutions. The new directions their research will take us could be revolutionary.”

“It’s great to have four highly decorated, very talented early-career physicists join the department,” said Irfan Siddiqi , professor and chair of physics and a pioneer in using superconducting quantum circuits as qubits for quantum computing. “They bridge traditional fields of physics with more modern notions of quantum information science. What’s wonderful is, not only are they pushing a particular discipline forward, but they’re also seeing how harnessing the quantum nature of light and matter can push the limits of quantum sensors and the power of quantum computers.”

Keegan Houser, UC Berkeley

The theory of quantum mechanics, which describes how matter and light interact at the smallest scales, has been around for more than 100 years. It explains many aspects of nature that defy common sense, such as the fact that light behaves like both a wave and a particle — at the same time. The phones and computers we use daily employ semiconductor chips that operate because of quantum effects. Quantum mechanics describes why some materials become superconductors at ultracold temperatures, and also how plants absorb light for photosynthesis.

Researchers in labs around the campus have long explored the quantum properties of new materials, clusters of cold atoms, excited single atoms and chemical interactions, to name a few. Others take advantage of the known quantum properties of matter to make sensitive detectors for magnetic fields or gravity or to make precise atomic clocks.

Scientists are also leveraging another weirdness of quantum mechanics called entanglement — first proven in a UC Berkeley physics lab in 1972 — to build quantum computers. Entanglement links the fates of one or more particles such that what happens to one instantly affects what happens to the others, no matter how far apart they are. Quantum computers are based on manipulating entangled quantum bits — qubits — to solve some problems that would take a classical supercomputer an eternity.

As these fields have ramped up, UC Berkeley researchers have entangled themselves in numerous quantum efforts spearheaded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. UC Berkeley is the lead institution for the NSF-funded Challenge Institute for Quantum Computation , which addresses fundamental challenges to the development of the quantum computer, including the training of new quantum scientists.

UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab also partner on DOE-funded efforts, such as the Quantum Systems Accelerator to explore different types of qubits and computing algorithms, the Advanced Quantum Testbed , an incubator for innovative quantum computation technologies, and QUANT-NET (Quantum Application Network Testbed for Novel Entanglement Technology), which hopes to build a network to teleport information between quantum computers on the campus and at Berkeley Lab via optical fiber. Another effort, Quantum Algorithms for Chemical Sciences , focuses on developing algorithms that can be used with quantum computers to predict the outcome of chemical reactions.

The four new experimentalists will take campus research in new but complementary directions, Kahn said, focusing on using quantum systems as sensitive detectors to discover new physics.

“Each of them is linked to other research at Berkeley not currently relying on quantum sensing, but which could benefit from quantum links, such as applying qubit technology to sensing,” he said.

Speaking for her and her colleagues, Suleymanzade said, “I think all of our dreams revolve around how to get some sort of enhancements from these quantum mechanical properties that are either very different or advantageous in comparison to classical systems and classical resources.”

“All of these folks have one foot in fundamental science, the other foot in technological applications of quantum technologies,” Siddiqi said. “And that, of course, attracts a lot of local talent, helps build the workforce, and brings quantum a step closer to being more mainstream technology.”

Aziza Suleymanzade: Networking quantum computers

Suleymanzade will join the physics faculty in July 2025 after finishing up her postdoctoral work at Harvard University, her undergraduate alma mater.

Courtesy of Aziza Suleymanzade.

Her main interest is using photons of light to interconnect quantum computers, networking computers in dispersed labs the way that digital computers are linked today through the internet. Doing this is complicated, in part because there are different types of quantum computers that use different quantum systems — trapped ions, superconducting circuits, even photons — as qubits. Just about anything that can be entangled can be used as a qubit for quantum computing.

The other challenge is linking the quantum information in these computers via entangled photons through a fiber optic cable without losing the entanglement that allows computation.

“In the future we will have distributed quantum sensing or distributed quantum computing, where you can imagine having a network of quantum nodes located in different places, even across tens of kilometers of distances, and being able to distribute entanglement and exotic quantum resources and being able to actually do computation distributed over larger distances, similar to how we do currently in classical computers,” Suleymanzade said.

She plans to tackle this challenge in her own lab in the basement of Birge Hall, where rooms are windowless to avoid extraneous light and vibrations are dampened to reduce the shaking of mirrors and lenses that direct the laser beams that provide the photons. She hopes to combine two types of quantum qubit systems already well developed — superconducting circuits and highly excited cold atoms called Rydberg atoms — into a hybrid system.

“I’m an experimentalist, so I’m really excited about bridging these platforms together to create new quantum systems with capabilities that are not just the sum of the two,” she said. “My motivation is to get entanglement out of these systems into the world.”

A native of Azerbaijan, she grew up in Russia but finished high school in Islamabad, Pakistan, where she learned enough English to apply and be accepted at Harvard. After earning a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and returned to Harvard to work in the quantum optics lab of Mikhail Lukin.

Chiara Salemi: Dark matter axions

The search for dark matter — the mysterious missing mass in the universe — has moved into the laboratory, with a focus on finding evidence for a theoretical dark matter particle called the axion. As a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Salemi helped build a table-top experiment called ABRACADABRA (A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with an Amplifying B-field Ring Apparatus) to try to detect these particles, which should be all around us. Currently in a joint postdoctoral position at Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, she’s working on a low-mass axion detector called DMRadio, a scaled up version of ABRACADABRA, and a high-mass axion detector called BREAD (Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection).

She plans to continue her search for axions at Berkeley employing superconducting circuits — qubits and superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDS) — as detectors.

Courtesy of Chiara Salemi

“If axions themselves are very light, that means there have to be a lot of them, so instead of treating the axions as individual particles, we look at the coherent effect of all of the axions acting together as a classical field,” she said. “You can do classical electromagnetism to study how they interact, but quantum sensors are a perfect way to detect these very tiny electromagnetic effects.”

The superconducting circuits used as qubits in quantum computers are ideal for quantum sensors, since they have been studied extensively.

“You can’t really build a quantum computer to do practical things right now. But the level that quantum technology is at right now is basically perfect for developing these quantum sensors,” she said.

Qubit sensors would allow her to look for high-mass axions in a range so-far unexplored. SQUIDs, another type of quantum circuit, are better suited for detecting low-mass axions.

As result of her current joint position at Stanford and SLAC, she’s become accustomed to collaborating with colleagues at DOE labs. At Berkeley, she will be affiliated with Berkeley Lab and is eager to interact with theorists and experimentalists there and on campus. She is already collaborating on the DMRadio experiment with Karl van Bibber, professor of nuclear engineering.

A native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Salemi first delved into dark matter detection — looking for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS) as well as axions — while an undergraduate physics and math major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After earning her PhD from MIT, she accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) and SLAC. She will join the physics department on Jan. 1, 2025.

Victoria Xu: Squeezed light

During its first three runs between 2015 and 2020, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected ripples in spacetime from about 90 mergers of black holes and neutron stars, all from relatively near events. Expanding LIGO’s cosmic reach for the current run, which began in May 2023, required squeezing more sensitivity from the detectors, and to Xu, that meant squeezing light.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime. LIGO works by detecting the tiny fluctuations these waves produce in the distance two laser beams travel along perpendicular arms more than a kilometer long. If their paths are not exactly equal, as when a gravitational wave lengthens one arm and shortens the other, the beams interfere proportionate to the intensity of the gravitational wave.

Xu said that squeezing the laser light is important because the LIGO team is continuously optimizing all other aspects of the detectors, reducing the classical noise so that quantum noise prevails.

“Laser light is fundamentally composed of photons, and at some point quantization of light into photons limits you. That’s quantum noise,” Xu said.

She and the LIGO detector team, including colleagues at MIT, where she has been a postdoc for the past three years, upgraded the squeezing subsystem — first employed in 2019 for the third run — for the fourth round of observations. Within eight months, they detected nearly as many gravitational wave triggers from mergers in real-time as during the previous three runs combined. The reach of the detectors has increased by 65%, she said, extending the reach of gravitational-wave detectors far deeper into the universe.

Further reducing quantum noise with squeezing meant installing a special 300-meter cavity along the laser beamline that optimizes the entanglement between “squeezed” photon pairs to enhance detector sensitivity. Squeezing allows complementary properties of the vacuum field — phase and amplitude — to be manipulated. For some frequencies of gravitational waves, reducing noise in the phase produces a more sensitive detection, even though the amplitude noise increases. For other frequencies the opposite is true. Her focus at Berkeley will be in further applying quantum technologies to maximize detections of merging massive objects in the universe.

“We are really pursuing the best possible measurement that can be made,” she said. “It’s pretty cool because, for me, I get to work with this great team of people. I get to learn from scientists all over the world and build a new detector that’s going to discover new things about the universe. It’s kind of the best of all worlds. It checks all the boxes I like.”

A Bay Area native, Xu attended UC Santa Barbara, majoring in physics, and came to UC Berkeley as a graduate student, where she worked on atom interferometry with Holger Müller. After receiving her Ph.D., she moved to MIT to work on laser interferometry with the large LIGO team. In January 2025, she will join the Berkeley faculty.

“It’s like a homecoming to me,” she said.

Harry Levine: Fun with qubits

Levine will come to UC Berkeley in July 2025 after a four-year stint at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, a partnership between Amazon Web Services and the California Institute of Technology based on the university’s campus in Pasadena. There he has been working on one of the most popular types of qubits for quantum computing, solid state circuits cooled to cryogenic temperatures.

Courtesy of Harry Levine

At Berkeley, he hopes to turn to a type of qubit he worked on for his Ph.D. at Harvard University: single atoms levitated in vacuum chambers. He plans to build vacuum chambers to study and control these at the level of each individual atom. An interesting challenge, he said, is to learn how to control and entangle the quantum motion of clusters of atoms.

“Now that we know how to control atoms with a very rich toolbox these days, we can think about taking multiple atoms and delocalizing all of them in an entangled way,” he said. “I think what’s so exciting about it is, it can offer us a new way to try to make the most macroscopic, crazy quantum states that you can imagine, to try to push the bounds on how massive of an object can you put in a superposition state. That’s kind of always a frontier in which you want to observe quantum effects in larger and larger systems and over more and more macroscopic length scales.”

He’s also interested in ways to suppress the noise in quantum systems, which causes them to lose their entanglement, a process called decoherence. One possible way to reduce decoherence, that is, increase the lifetime of entangled qubits and decrease the errors in quantum computing, is to group qubits together into “logical qubits” that may be less susceptible to decoherence. He plans to explore new strategies for doing so, leveraging and expanding on some of the very exciting progress in the field over the last few years, he said.

Upon hearing that he had been offered a position in the physics department, “I was super excited,” he said. “Berkeley is an incredible institution. I have so much respect for the community here and feel so honored to be offered the chance to join. I think it’ll be an amazing place to start a research group and to contribute to the educational mission of the university.”

A native of Los Angeles, Levine obtained his undergraduate degree in physics and math from Stanford and his Ph.D. from Harvard. Now, he said, he’s taking the unusual leap back into academia after a stint as an industry scientist.

Solar energy breakthrough could reduce need for solar farms

Scientists at Oxford University Physics Department have developed a revolutionary approach which could generate increasing amounts of solar electricity without the need for silicon-based solar panels. Instead, their innovation works by coating a new power-generating material onto the surfaces of everyday objects such as rucksacks, cars, and mobile phones.

This ultra-thin material, using this so-called multi-junction approach, has now been independently certified to deliver over 27% energy efficiency, for the first time matching the performance of traditional, single-layer, energy-generating materials known as silicon photovoltaics. Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), gave its certification prior to publication of the researchers’ scientific study later this year.

‘During just five years experimenting with our stacking or multi-junction approach we have raised power conversion efficiency from around 6% to over 27%, close to the limits of what single-layer photovoltaics can achieve today,’ said Dr Shuaifeng Hu , Post Doctoral Fellow at Oxford University Physics. ‘We believe that, over time, this approach could enable the photovoltaic devices to achieve far greater efficiencies, exceeding 45%.’

This compares with around 22% energy efficiency from solar panels today (meaning they convert around 22% of the energy in sunlight), but the versatility of the new ultra-thin and flexible material is also key. At just over one micron thick, it is almost 150 times thinner than a silicon wafer. Unlike existing photovoltaics, generally applied to silicon panels, this can be applied to almost any surface.

‘By using new materials which can be applied as a coating, we’ve shown we can replicate and out-perform silicon whilst also gaining flexibility. This is important because it promises more solar power without the need for so many silicon-based panels or specially-built solar farms,’ said Dr Junke Wang , Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions Postdoc Fellow at Oxford University Physics.

The latest innovations in solar materials and techniques demonstrated in our labs could become a platform for a new industry, manufacturing materials to generate solar energy more sustainably and cheaply by using existing buildings, vehicles, and objects. Henry Snaith , Professor of Renewable Energy, Oxford University Physics Department.

The researchers believe their approach will continue to reduce the cost of solar and also make it the most sustainable form of renewable energy. Since 2010, the global average cost of solar electricity has fallen by almost 90%, making it almost a third cheaper than that generated from fossil fuels. Innovations promise additional cost savings as new materials, like thin-film perovskite, reduce the need for silicon panels and purpose-built solar farms.

‘We can envisage perovskite coatings being applied to broader types of surface to generate cheap solar power, such as the roof of cars and buildings and even the backs of mobile phones. If more solar energy can be generated in this way, we can foresee less need in the longer term to use silicon panels or build more and more solar farms’ Dr Wang added.

The researchers are among 40 scientists working on photovoltaics led by Professor of Renewable Energy Henry Snaith at Oxford University Physics Department. Their pioneering work in photovoltaics and especially the use of thin-film perovskite began around a decade ago and benefits from a bespoke, robotic laboratory.

Oxford PV, a UK company spun out of Oxford University Physics in 2010 by co-founder and chief scientific officer Professor Henry Snaith to commercialise perovskite photovoltaics, recently started large-scale manufacturing of perovskite photovoltaics at its factory in Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, near Berlin, Germany. This is the world’s first volume manufacturing line for ‘perovskite-on-silicon’ tandem solar cells.

‘We originally looked at UK sites to start manufacturing but the government has yet to match the fiscal and commercial incentives on offer in other parts of Europe and the United States,’ Professor Snaith said. ‘Thus far the UK has thought about solar energy purely in terms of building new solar farms, but the real growth will come from commercialising innovations – we very much hope that the newly-created British Energy will direct its attention to this.’

‘Supplying these materials will be a fast-growth new industry in the global green economy and we have shown that the UK is innovating and leading the way scientifically. However, without new incentives and a better pathway to convert this innovation into manufacturing the UK will miss the opportunity to lead this new global industry,’ Professor Snaith added.

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