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FLEET News

Learning to tell their science story: ECR comms training

Communications workshop for early-career researchers and PhD students Success in science requires the ability to describe one’s research in a coherent and compelling manner. FLEET has made an early start in building these skills in ECRs, with a half-day training session targeting science communications skills. A professional external facilitator from consultancy Mind Your Way coached young researchers on the particular …

Live-streamed FLEET seminars

In 2018 FLEET began a series of live-streamed seminars to help share research results across the Centre, keep members informed on latest FLEET research, and enhance inter-node collaboration. Early-career researchers presenting the seminars gain valuable presentation experience, and benefit from feedback on their research from diverse Centre members. These seminars also provide an opportunity for regular get-togethers in each node, …

Engaging with policymakers in 2018

Education Minister Simon Birmingham and ARC CEO Sue Thomas visited FLEET labs in may this year at the University of Wollongong’s (UOW’s) Innovation Campus. UOW node leader Prof Xiaolin Wang, Centre Deputy Director Prof Alex Hamilton (UNSW) and UOW researchers gave the Minister a quick introduction to ICT energy-use issues, topological insulators and atomically-thin materials, including a tour of labs …

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FLEET’s first annual workshop: member engagement

Forging a Centre that is greater than the sum of its parts FLEET’s inaugural annual workshop in Torquay, Victoria, represented the Centre’s first chance to cement relationships between geographically-isolated research nodes and diverse physics disciplines. With a focus on education, each day began with a tutorial laying out the fundamentals for one of three research themes. This introduction maximised the …

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Centre hosts major international 2D conference: ICON2DMat

FLEET hosted the International Conference on Two-Dimensional Materials and Technologies (ICON-2DMat) in Melbourne in December 2018. This was the first time ICON-2DMat had been held in Australia, and with around 300 international and Australian delegates attending, it was an opportunity to showcase the strength of atomically-thin materials research in Australia. Attendance at the international conferences on 2D materials is growing, …

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 …