Physics Grand Challenges
Driving excellence in physics and interdisciplinary science research and teaching.
In 2019, a new initiative was conceived by then Head of School, Professor Celine Boehm, to fund ground-breaking research projects – The Physics Foundation Grand Challenges.
Each year we invite Academics from the School of Physics to pitch a unique and unconventional concept that must include a team of non-physics researchers and students to a panel of experts. We typically select two teams to receive $250,000 each.
AI is used in many areas of modern physics, but physics is also shedding new light on the physical nature of neuro-inspired intelligence.
Representative research themes: astronomy, quantum physics, particle physics, medical physics, complex systems, neural dynamics.
What is dark matter? What about dark energy? And how does space emerge? How do we reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity? How do galaxies, stars and planets form? These questions, and more, still remain waiting to be answered.
Representative research themes: astronomy, particle physics, space physics, cosmology, quantum physics.
New phenomena are found on the nanoscale and things we thought we knew can behave in unpredictable ways. Quantum effects, such as superposition and entanglement, offer the potential of unprecedented information processing, but how can we control fragile quantum states to achieve this?
Representative research themes: nanoscience, quantum physics, photonics, materials physics.
Smart materials, devices and renewable energy technologies, underpinned by physics, offer the best solution to the growing climate change problems we face. Physics-based analytical techniques are also used to quantify environmental impacts of our activities.
Representative research themes: materials physics, photonics, space physics, sustainability analysis.
In the era of social media, post-truth can propagate out of control, how do we raise the visibility and credibility of science and scientists? What strategies are most effective in abolishing misinformation and disrupting disinformation? How can we convincingly communicate physics to reverse the retreat from reason?
Representative research themes: physics communication, physics education.
Physics has always played a pivotal role in medicine and biology – from the discovery of the DNA double helix structure to the invention of MRI. Now, new insights are emerging into the inner workings of the human brain – possibly the most complex structure in the universe.
Representative research themes: biological physics, neurophysics, medical physics, photonics, imaging.
Awarded $250,000 over two years
Associate Professor Boris Kuhlmey, Dr Alex Song and their team aim to develop new types of textiles that can keep people cool in hot environments, without using any energy or electricity.
These textiles are based on a technique called passive cooling, which means they can reflect the sun's heat and radiate the body's heat into the cold of space. This way, the textiles can lower the temperature of the wearer by several degrees, even in full sun.
Emphasis will be on using materials suitable for everyday wear already use in the textile industry, changing their properties through nanostructuring.
Awarded $50,000
This project combines two incredibly important fields: quantum physics and machine learning, for the analysis of time-dependent signals.
Time dependent signals are ubiquitous and are central to solving problems in industries as diverse as biomedicine, mining, social media, and finance.
The project brings together world-leading expertise in quantum many-body physics, time-series machine learning, and neural networks to develop cutting-edge time-series classification methods that leverage powerful techniques from quantum mechanics for the first time.
Awarded $50,000
The Holy Grail in molecular sensing is the capability to detect and identify any individual molecule in a mixture, like pollutants in air (CO2, CH4) or water (hydrocarbons, nitrides), biomarkers for diseases in body fluids (DNA, exosomes), very small pathogens in air/breath (coronaviruses, influenza).
We envision developing such a scanner in the form of an on-chip enhanced Raman scattering sensor, thereby realising an artificial optical nose. Particularly, in this proposal, we will focus on specific biomarkers for early pancreatic cancer detection, as our primary killer application.
The vision is to increase the survival rate by detecting these biomarkers and therefore detecting the presence of pancreatic cancer early enough to be more effectively treated.
