The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – which Durham helped to develop and engineer – has captured its first images.

From Monday 16th until Friday 20th May, the Assembly Rooms theatre is hosting an exciting new project from their in-house Technical Theatre Team in collaboration with the Durham University Physics Department. 'The Final Frontier' is an immersive, experiential and theatrical journey into space that is designed to calm the mind and may help to relieve exam stress.

Prof. Heather Lewandowski is this year's invited speaker to deliver the 2022 Rochester Lecture, which will be held in the Ph8 Lecture Theatre, Wednesday 18 May 2022 at 4.30pm. This year's lecture is titled 'Watching chemical reactions happen one molecule at a time'.

The Physics Department Development Talent Award promotes, enhances and encourages the possibility of early career researchers developing their research careers within the Department by providing support in the form of up to £10,000 in flexible funding. The four successful applicants in the 2022 round of this scheme are announced below. Congratulations and best of luck with your research!

The Honorary President of the National Skills Academy for Nuclear (NSAN) and member of the ONR Independent Advisory Panel, Dame Sue Ion, delivered this year's annual Gareth Roberts Lecture on Wednesday 9 March at 4.30pm.

An international team of researchers, including Professor Carlos Frenk, Professor Adrian Jenkins and Dr. John Helly from our Department of Physics, has produced the largest and most accurate computer simulation to date of our local patch of the Universe.

Ultracold molecules hold great promise for a variety of quantum technologies, including a new generation of quantum computers and quantum simulators. Prof Simon Cornish will lead a new £1.6 million International Collaboration funded by EPSRC that aims to deliver this vision.

The RSE is supporting personal and professional development for undergraduate astronomy students.

As a demonstration of single atom trapping, researchers in the Quantum Light and Matter research section have created and imaged festive arrangements of individual laser-cooled caesium atoms. Each bright pixel in their images corresponds to light captured from a single caesium atom cooled to a temperature a million times colder than room temperature and trapped in a tightly focussed laser beam called an optical tweezer.

A retirement party was held for Alan Lotts on Friday 19th November to celebrate 5 decades of outstanding technical support to the astronomy group.

Researchers in the Centre for Materials Physics have demonstrated that spontaneous magnetic fields, detected by implanting sub-atomic muons in superconducting materials, are likely to be intrinsic to an exotic, time-reversal symmetry broken, superconducting state.

Three of our professors have been named among the world’s best for the quality and influence of their research, highlighting the global strength of Durham’s research.