Two UCL academics honoured by the Institute of Physics
Professor Chris Kay (London Centre for Nanotechnology at UCL) and Dr Jonathan Breeze (UCL Physics & Astronomy) are among a team of researchers who have been awarded the prestigious Michael Faraday Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics. The team, consisting of six academics at UCL, Imperial College London, the University of Northumberland and Universitą degli Studi di Torino, were honoured for their role in discovering the first solid-state room-temperature masers in pentacene and then in diamond. The maser is a sister technology of the laser, but emitting coherent microwave radiation instead of light. It is the ultimate amplifier for microwave signals, boosting weak electromagnetic radiation without contributing additional noise. Although invented more than 60 years ago, the maser has had little widespread impact because it was inconvenient to use, only functioning in high magnetic fields, in a vacuum and at cryogenic temperatures close to absolute zero. Despite these limitations the maser found niche application in radio astronomy and deep-space exploration. The team's work in getting a solid-state maser to work continuously at room temperature opens up many life-enhancing applications for the technology in fields such as medical imaging, quantum computing, and even the search for life on distant planets.
