The 45th Annual Condensed Matter and Materials Meeting in Wagga Wagga

The 45th Annual Condensed Matter and Materials Meeting has been held, in-person, in Wagga Wagga, NSW, Charles Sturt University site, 7 - 10 of February 2023.

Zeb Krix and Aydin Keser presented talks. Jack Engdahl’s poster on “Micromagnets dramatically enhance effects of viscous hydrodynamic flow in two-dimensional electron fluid” attracted a lot of attention. Congratulations to Jack, who became one of the winners for the best poster presentation.

The conference was a success and participants have heard and discussed recent advances in condensed matter research from around Australia and New Zealand.

Report on Gordon Godfrey Workshop 2022

The 2022 Gordon Godfrey Workshop on Spins, Topology and Strong Electron Correlations was held at UNSW, School of Physics, from 21 to 25th of November 2022. The workshop brought together more than 130 scientists including 30 invited speakers from Australia, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, Austria, New Zealand, and USA. PhD and Honours students and early career researchers presented their posters at the special evening session on Tuesday. The participants exchanged the latest research results in the fields of quantum and condensed-matter physics. The new fascinating ideas have been discussed at the conference with great interest.

School of Physics Colloquium, 17th November 2022 14:00 "Using quantum science to search for axion dark matter" Prof. Alex Sushkov (Boston University, USA).

The dark matter puzzle is one of the most important open problems in modern fundamental physics. I will describe some of the approaches that are used to search for non-gravitational interactions of ultralight dark matter, and the fundamental limitations on their sensitivity. The axion is a compelling dark matter candidate, since it resolves the strong-CP problem of quantum chromodynamics. I will focus on precision laboratory-scale experiments that search for axion-like dark matter, aiming to achieve, or circumvent, the quantum limits on their sensitivity. Specifically, the Cosmic Axion Spin Precession Experiment (CASPEr-e) uses nuclear magnetic resonance to search for the defining gluon coupling of the QCD axion. The prototype CASPEr-e experiment has achieved design sensitivity in the nano-electronvolt mass range. We are now developing the next-generation search, with the goal of achieving the sensitivity at the QCD axion level.

The 24th Congress of the Australian Institute of Physics, 2022

The 24th Congress of the Australian Institute of Physics will be held in Adelaide, South Australia, Sunday 11th - Friday 16th December 2022. The Congress venue is the Adelaide Convention Centre located in the heart of the city. The AIP Congress will cover the broad spectrum of academic and industrial physics activities in Australia. For more information follow the website

Physicists discover method for emulating nonlinear quantum electrodynamics in a laboratory setting

Purdue University News (USA) published a short note on our paper.

The authors of the paper, A. Keser, Y. Lyanda-Geller and O. Sushkov, applied quantum field theory nonperturbative methods used to describe high-energy particles and expanded them to analyze the behavior of so-called Dirac materials, which recently became the focus of interest. They used the expansion to obtain results that go both beyond known high-energy results and the general framework of condensed matter and materials physics. They suggested various experimental configurations with applied electric and magnetic fields and analyzed best materials that would allow them to experimentally study this quantum electrodynamic effect in a nonaccelerator setting. They subsequently discovered that their results better explained some magnetic phenomena that had been observed and studied in earlier experiments.