UofG researchers set out for New Horizons

Researchers from the University of Glasgow's College of Science & Engineering are sharing in new funding for adventurous, high-risk research. Four projects from three Schools have received support from the £25.5m New Horizons fund, administered by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC). A total of 126 adventurous projects in the mathematical and physical sciences will benefit from the pilot funding from EPSRC, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Grants of up to £200,000 to cover a maximum of two years' work were available to New Horizons applicants, with a streamlined application process and a review process focused on the transformational potential of the research. Dr Joerg Goette and Dr Robert Bennett of the School of Physics & Astronomy will explorea new method of trapping and manipulating atoms which could have new applications in areas, including quantum computation. The method is based on interfering laser beams in such a way that a grid appears, made up of areas in which the light has different values of a property known as helicity. This new type of optical lattice also contains electric and magnetic substructures, which can be used to explore the response of atoms to the rapidly-varying electric and magnetic fields that constitute all light beams.