Current Work

At Swansea, we have firmly embraced the Impact agenda, and have ongoing efforts to ensure that we maintain and enhance our profile in this arena. Here are a few examples of current work, and where we think our research will have future reach beyond academia.

Within the ALSU, we continue to work with partners Spectrum Technologies. We are developing a high-powered laser plasma technique based on infra-red laser technology to remove enamel insulation from magnetic wires by means of plasma ablation. A grant has been awarded to the ALSU for this work by the ASTUTE Wales project, under the Advanced Sustainable Manufacturing Technologies component. Telle has been joined by Swansea pulsed laser specialist Dr Will Bryan for this work.

The ALSU is also engaged in a raft of applications of Raman spectroscopy and microscopy. We are working together with Swansea’s Centre for Nano Health (http://www.swansea.ac.uk/nanohealth), a £21M project part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund. Ongoing projects include Raman spectroscopy and imaging for rapid diagnostics of bacterial infec­tions and devel­oping methodologies towards single-cell spectroscopy using tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. Swansea nano-scale physics expert Dr Peter Dunstan is also heavily involved in this activity.

Swansea’s Institute for Life Science is also host to a state-of-the-art MRI system. The AMQP group’s Dr Sophie Schirmer is starting to apply her quantum control techniques to design new pulse sequences to facilitate Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy of biologically active and important molecules. It is hoped that advances in clinical imaging capabilities will ensue.

Under the auspices of BSMBench Ltd, general-purpose parallel software based on BSMBench is under development that can be used in High-Performance Computing applications in sectors such as finance, aerospace engineering, weather forecasting and oil extraction.

Swansea’s antihydrogen group will continue to develop their outreach programme. We will have a presence once again at the National and Urdd Eisteddfodau this year. We also hope to develop the Hands on Antihydrogen software to include antihydrogen trapping and to augment the programme with educational material describing antimatter and its applications. In 2015 Swansea will host a major symposium on antimatter under the auspices of the Learned Society of Wales.