FLEET News
Just under 120 members, family and affiliates gathered in Lorne Victoria this month for FLEET’s 2023 annual workshop, which featured 35 scientific talks (over 60% of them by ECRs), 30 accompanying family (17 kids), a cultural celebration dinner, karaoke, quiz, lawn bowls, and lots of unstructured time for collaborative discussions. Invited presentations included: Nicola Gaston, MacDiarmid Institute Mateusz Król, Warsaw …
An exciting partnership between FLEET and APR-intern will fund new route to gain valuable ‘on the floor’ industry experience for FLEET PhD/Masters students, increasing job skills and leveraging Australian scientific expertise in industry, with funding supporting the placement of research students with industry partners. In addition to injecting fresh scientific and problem-solving energy into participating industry workplaces, the program will …
Homogenous liquid-metal nanodroplets achieved with high-temperature molten salt Australian researchers put planets in the palm of the hand Liquid metal, planet-like nanodroplets are successfully formed with a new technique developed at RMIT University, Australia. Like our own Planet Earth, the nanodroplets feature an outer ‘crust’, a liquid metal ‘mantle’, and a solid ‘core’. The solid intermetallic core is the key …
First published at RMIT Researchers have created a small device that ‘sees’ and creates memories in a similar way to humans, in a promising step towards one day having applications that can make rapid, complex decisions such as in self-driving cars. The neuromorphic invention is a single chip enabled by a sensing element, doped indium oxide, that is thousands of …
A new expanded mentoring network vastly increases the experience pool available for ECRs and others in 12 participating ARC Centres providing: structured mentoring with ongoing support and oversight access to a range of resources and peer-mentoring groups large, diverse pool of mentors and mentees for both researchers and professional staff. Allowing members of the participating Centres to access mentors in …
Learning about ‘wavy’ stuff you can’t see, smell, taste or touch can test students’ intuitive understanding of the world. FLEET’s latest Forces and Energy teacher resource examines energy from the physics of Newton to Einstein, to the wavy behaviour of sub-atomic particles such as electrons. Students learn how energy is crucial to our understanding of how everything in the universe …
Leading materials physicist and FLEET Director Prof Michael Fuhrer has been recognised for his contributions to science, elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Professor Fuhrer is one of 20 researchers elected as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, announced today. Prof Michael Fuhrer is an international leader in study of the electronic properties of 2D and …
Teaching energy, releasing creativity, and inspiring future scientists FLEET and Monash volunteers used catapults, graphite circuits and diffraction goggles to create challenges for 250 Mater Christi College students competing to win their annual STEM Cup. For the STEM Cup challenge, which is judged on teamwork, innovation and communication, FLEET designed two hands-on workshops that got middle and senior secondary students …
FLEET is pleased to announce that Dr Torben Daeneke is now a Chief Investigator in FLEET. As a Scientific Associate Investigator in FLEET (RMIT node) since the outset of the Centre, Torben and has been a prodigious contributor to FLEET’s research effort as well as FLEET’s governance. “I welcome the opportunity to become a FLEET Chief Investigator,” says Torben. “I …
Unleashing the combined power of electrons and holes for better quantum computing Congratulations to FLEET Deputy Director Prof Alex Hamilton, who has been named an Industry Laureate Fellow by the ARC. Alex and his team at UNSW receive $3.8 million towards ground-breaking silicon-based quantum-computer technology to dramatically speed up computation, enabling Australia to maintain its global lead in quantum technologies. …
First published Australian National University A surprise observation of negative mass in exciton-polaritons has added yet another dimension of weirdness to these strange light-matter hybrid particles. Dr Matthias Wurdack, Dr Tinghe Yun and Dr Eliezer Estrecho from the Department of Quantum Sciences and Technology (QST) were experimenting with exciton polaritons when they realised that under certain conditions the dispersion became …
Congratulations to Dr Matthias Wurdack (FLEET/ANU), who has received a Schmidt Science Fellowship to develop artificial retinas. Matthias started his’ PhD at ANU in 2018, working with FLEET CI Elena Ostrovskaya to create, investigate and engineer the properties of hybrid light-matter particles in atomically-thin semiconductors with the aim to realise room temperature superfluidity based on this material platform, and understand and elevate …
A process has been developed to engineer nanoscale arrays of conducting channels for advanced scalable electronic circuitry Using ion implantation and lithography, investigators created patterns of topological surface edge states on a topological material that made the surface edges conductive while the bulk layer beneath remained an insulator Low energy ion implantation, neutron and X-ray reflectometry techniques at ANSTO supported …
Can a solid be a superfluid? Bilayer excitons form a quantum supersolid A collaboration of Australian and European physicists predict that layered electronic 2D semiconductors can host a curious quantum phase of matter called the supersolid. The supersolid is a very counterintuitive phase indeed. It is made up of particles that simultaneously form a rigid crystal and yet at the …
Electrically controlled superconductor-to-“failed insulator” transition, and giant anomalous Hall effect in the kagome metal CsV3Sb5 A new RMIT-led international collaboration published in February has uncovered, for the first time, a distinct disorder-driven bosonic superconductor-insulator transition. The discovery outlines a global picture of the giant anomalous Hall effect and reveals its correlation with the unconventional charge density wave in the AV3Sb5 …