The University of Southampton is proud to have recently joined the Planet Possibility consortium. Working with partners that include the University of Birmingham, the Blair project, Future First and All About Group, the consortium aims to improve the diversity of people learning, researching and working in the field of physics. 

Negative perceptions held by young people toward the topic of physics and a lack of relatable role models are key issues that need addressing to help generate interest and nurture talent. The Institute of Physics has provided the consortium with £1.9m from its IoP Challenge Fund to help deliver a new digital platform and coordinated programme of activity to support the initiative in encouraging and developing talent into physics related careers. 

The University of Southampton is offering bespoke, one-to-one support to neurodiverse physics and astronomy undergraduates in finding placement opportunities tailored to their specific needs. This includes adapting work patterns and skills required for the placement, as well as tailored support in locating placements in specific industries. They are also running a series of workshops that will address industry skills gaps and better place graduates on the jobs market. 

All partners involved, from consortium members to industry placement hosts, will build their experience in diversity and inclusion, whilst engaging and inspiring young people with STEM subjects and careers. 

Professor Malgosia Kaczmarek, Professor of Physics and Astronomy and lead researcher for the project commented: 

‘The challenges that the neurodiverse community in Physics face are not in any way negligible. Engaging in placement activities with industry, in a fast-paced commercial setting which, while helping to address many skills gaps, is not often an activity that the community wants to, or feels able to engage with. Working as part of a consortium through Planet Possibility to embrace challenges at many different levels, and to share skills and expertise that each partner brings respectively to the table, will go a long way in changing current mind-sets, facilitating access to opportunities, free of barriers and ensuring that inclusivity is very firmly placed on the Physics agenda.’

Interdisciplinary Physics and Astronomy research at Southampton have been awarded more than £700,000 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funding to develop new instruments that can improve environmental sustainability when testing photonic integrated circuits at full wafer scale.

Professor Otto Muskens, Professor of Physics and Head of the Quantum Light and Matter Group, is leading the project that will involve colleagues from the Zepler Institute's (ZI) Silicon Photonics Group and Cornerstone silicon photonics rapid prototyping foundry.

Otto said: “Integrated photonics is becoming a multi-billion-pound industry that is revolutionising information and communication technology. High volume fabrication of circuits with reliable performance requires sophisticated testing methods that can identify any malfunctioning devices early in the process.”

“On-wafer testing reduces unnecessary waste in materials, tooling and energy and feeds information on tolerances back into the manufacturing process. Cleanrooms are amongst the most energy and carbon intensive industries and advanced testing methods can contribute to an improved environmental sustainability.”

“Our new techniques are complementary to existing wafer probers, which only measure end-to-end performance of the device, and allow us to look inside the circuit to obtain information on the individual component of the device.”

“We have been working on the fundamental science of this research for a number of years and have developed the technique to a laboratory prototype that has been successfully used in basic research in our group.”

“Everything was ready for a full-scale development - we had already developed the collaborations with industrial partners and foundries - and this EPSRC funding allows us to now convert all this work into a real project. Our aim is to develop tools that will improve manufacturing research and can initially be used in the characterisation of devices coming out of research labs. However, longer term our ambition is to develop this into a tool than can be used in industry itself.”

As well as working with colleagues in the ZI and at Cornerstone, the team will also collaborate with Smart Photonics in The Netherlands, IHP Microelectronics, in Germany, and the MISSION Program Grant that is aimed at developing a mid-infrared integrated photonics platform for sensing.

Otto added: “For many years we have been looking at using these tools for basic research, it is an exciting challenge for us to be able to develop something that could find much wider use. We are using this opportunity to develop new skills in our lab, which may then be used for other parts of our research.”

“We expect that new and interesting things will appear when we are looking at the range of devices and that there will be plenty of scope of new collaborations and multidisciplinary research.”

In an article published in Physical Review Letters and featured in Editors' Suggestions, a group of researchers including the University of Southampton's Dr Helgi Sigurdsson and Professor Pavlos Lagoudakis have demonstrated Young's famous double-slit experiment in the reciprocal space (the space of directions) rather than the conventional position space. This could enable new opportunities for controlling the properties of light.

Young's double-slit experiment from almost 220 years ago shows that when light waves pass through two slits in a plate they undergo a phenomenon known as diffraction. This creates an image composed of multiple bright fringes. By changing the distance between the slits, the angle and direction of the diffracted waves is affected which, in turn, affects the fringe separation in the interference image. In this way, the two slits transform information about the light from position space into the so-called reciprocal space - the space of directions or momentum.

Scientists from the Hybrid Photonics group at University of Southampton, the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology in Warsaw and the Institute of Physics Polish Academy of Sciences, have now discovered that a similar, inverse, experiment can be performed in the reciprocal space. To do this, they used a microscale optical resonator filled with a liquid crystal. The resonator, consisting of two mirrors facing each other, could trap photons, enabling the liquid crystal inside to twist their internal properties. By applying an electric voltage across the resonator, the liquid crystal molecules inside could be rotated so that linearly polarised light was forced to change into right- and left-handed circular polarised waves that belonged to two different 'slits' in reciprocal space.

Helgi from the University of Southampton's Hybrid Photonics Group says, "This type of an effect where polarisation and propagation direction of photons become intertwined, meaning a change in one causes a change in the other, is known in quantum mechanics as spin orbit coupling. Photonic spin orbit coupling is a relatively young field of research and full of opportunities to control the properties of light, like we show in our study."

The ?slits? in the reciprocal space resulted in a polarisation interference image of parallel fringes in the position space (i.e., the space of x-y-z coordinates). Such polarisation interference images had only been observed before in spins of electrons, dubbed the persistent spin helix. The scientists discovered that the liquid crystal microcavity led to the same pattern for the polarisation of light, referring to it as a photonic persistent spin helix.

The scientists then went even further and demonstrated that their liquid crystal microcavity could also separate the circular polarisations of light in position space. This meant that right hand circular polarised light would be deflected in one direction from the beam path and left hand circular light in the opposite. This observation coincided with the famous experiment of Stern and Gerlach in 1922 where the quantum mechanical nature of spin was discovered, but instead the scientists performed the experiment using light.

Therefore, during the one experiment, an optical analogy of two fundamental experiments of quantum mechanics were observed.