News

Read the latest FLEET news, below

Subscribe to monthly updates, sharing research news from around the Centre

Catch up on past issues of FLEET News

Tell us what you’d like to see in FLEET News

FLEET News

Building a cohesive Centre: 2018 annual workshop

Forging a Centre that is greater than the sum of its parts FLEET’s second annual workshop built on the successes of the 2017 workshop, bringing all of the Centre’s members and many international partners together in Magenta, mid-coast New South Wales. As in 2017, the workshop was family friendly, with partners and family made welcome at shared meals, social events …

First snapshot of exciton-polariton condensation process

First snapshot of exciton-polariton Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in an inorganic semiconductor Unique opportunity to understand details of BEC without statistical averaging Key to fundamental understanding of exciton-polaritons An ANU advance provides never-before-achieved ‘snapshot’ of Bose-Einstein condensation. Previously, observations of exciton-polaritons in a Bose-Einstein condensate were limited to statistical averaging over millions of condensation events. ‘Snapshot’ imaging of polaritons forming a …

Topological material switched off and on for the first time: key advance for future topological transistors

Significant step toward future topological electronics The first electric field-switchable topological material Topological transistors would be an ultra-low energy , beyond CMOS solution to ICT energy use after the end of Moore’s Law Over the last decade, there has been much excitement about the discovery, recognised by the Nobel Prize in Physics only two years ago, that there are two …

Three FLEET researchers in Clarivate highly-cited researchers list for 2018

Congratulations to: Michael Fuhrer (Monash University) in the fields of Materials Science; Physics Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh (UNSW and RMIT) in Chemistry; Engineering Qiaoliang Bao (Monash University) in Materials Science; Optics; Physics. The Clarivate Analytics list identifies researchers ranking in the top 1% by citations for their field. Now in its fifth year, the citation identifies influential researchers as determined by their …

New Australia–Italy collaboration: FLEET partners with University of Camerino

FLEET is pleased to announce a new partnership with the University of Camerino (Italy), which will exploit strengths of both groups in the study of exciton superfluids. The University’s Professor Andrea Perali and Professor David Neilson join FLEET as new Partner Investigators. Professors Perali and Neilson study the theory of of exciton superfluids,and since 2012 have collaborated with FLEET’s Deputy …

Clarifying effects of negative mass

A FLEET study led by University of Queensland’s David Colas clarifies recent studies of negative mass, investigating the strange phenomenon of self-interference. Negative mass?? When we think of ‘mass’, we usually consider the ‘inertial’ mass – the resistance of a body to acceleration due to an applied force. For a moving object, its mass is then a simple relationship between …

Topological insulators are like a block of chocolates

Electrically, topological insulators resemble a chocolate block wrapped in foil: electrically insulating on the inside (the chocolate), but electrically conductive around the edges (the foil). It’s a very useful analogy to describe a new type of material, but we decided to test whether it’s actually correct. We tested four bars of chocolate, measuring the electrical resistance of the surrounding foil, …

FLEET Director Michael Fuhrer in sustainable material-science event, NZ

Michael Fuhrer spoke last month at the NZ sustainable material-science event, Materialise, an event that saw significant coverage in NZ mainstream and science media. FLEET collaborators the MacDiarmid Institute organised the event, and surrounding coverage featured: an online game featuring a micro-sized Michael Fuhrer radio interview with MacDiarmid’s Nicola Gaston NZ Herald article re sustainable energy research, ultra low energy …

Researchers discover directional, long-lived nanolight in 2D material

An international team led by researchers from Soochow University (Suzhou, China), Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), University of Oviedo (Asturias, Spain), and CIC nanoGUNE (San Sebastián, Spain) have discovered squeezed light (‘nanolight’) in the nanoscale that propagates only in specific directions along thin slabs of molybdenum trioxide – a natural anisotropic 2D material. Besides its unique directional character, this nanolight lives …

Physicists tour FLEET-RMIT

FLEET’s RMIT labs recently hosted a tour by members of the Victorian branch of the Australian Institute of Physics, the country’s leading body for physics advocacy and support. The tour included the experimental laboratories and a briefing by RMIT node leader Prof Lan Wang, and AI Torben Daeneke, covering the research topics in Lan Wang’s group, Jared Cole’s group, JianZhen …

Congratulations Jared Cole CI

Congratulations to RMIT Professor Jared Cole, now a FLEET Chief Investigator. Jared is a theoretical physicist specialising in quantum physics and decoherence theory, particularly its application to solid-state systems. Within FLEET Jared investigates the influence of dissipation and decoherence on electronic transport in nanostructures, and its role in electronic devices based on topologically protected conduction channels. This is key to …

Nobel-winning science is key to Australian research: ultra-fast laser physics

Half of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses Ultra-fast laser physics key to development of future electronics The technique developed by Mourou and Strickland has had enormous impact across the fields of chemistry, physics and biology, and provides the basis for important …

diagram

Laser pulses quadrillionths of a second long probe electronic structure at Swinburne

Quantifying the dynamics and interactions of electronic systems is crucial for understanding the mechanisms that make them useful candidates for ultra-low energy electronics. We need to observe and measure the behaviour of electron interactions at a femtosecond scale (ie, at a few millionths of a billionth of a second). As a research tool, Optical Coherent Multidimensional Spectroscopy (CMDS) offers the …

First year physics students exploring future electronics

First year physics students enthusiastic to explore ‘new’ physics Measuring quantum Hall effect with liquid helium-3, a Cold War side-product Window to topological materials and future electronics UNSW first year physics students have been measuring the quantum Hall effect (QHE), a relatively new piece of physics recognised by the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics, which requires precision experimental setup. When …

FLEET collaboration aims to prevent energy losing its way

Published in Monash Lens 27 Sep 2018 Featuring Meera Parish & Michael Fuhrer, School of Physics & Astronomy, Monash University Cheaper, faster, smarter, smaller – the ever-evolving digital world has changed the way we live, as predicted by the law Gordon Moore outlined in 1965. Moore’s Law foretold that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would double …