AIP Industry Day – Three Faces of Physics
In 2020 it was not possible to host the annual AIP Industry Day at CSIRO Lindfield as we have done for many years. Neither did we entertain the concept of an all-day virtual alternative. Instead, we hosted a number of small virtual events on diverse topics and experimenting a little with the virtual formats.
Our speakers
2020 Scholarship winner: Benjamin Dix-Matthews
Benjamin’s project was ‘Coherent optical free-space frequency dissemination’. He developed an innovative system capable of overcoming the complex challenges associated with the stabilised free-space transfer of optical frequencies.
He used the 2020 CSIRO Alumni Scholarship to travel to France to test his prototype system in a practical experiment of an optical transmission between two buildings in Toulouse. The project was in collaboration with the CNES The French Space Agency.
2019 Scholarship winner: Matthew Rendell
Matthew’s project was to develop ultra-high quality germanium heterostructures, as well as the fabrication of working nanostructures on these high quality germanium wafers.
The travel scholarship assisted with expenses relating to Matthew’s research trip to the QUTech group at TU Delft in the Netherlands. This allowed him to access one of the best nanostructure research and fabrication groups in Europe.
Here he gained knowledge and skills in the growth of germanium heterostructures and nanoscale device fabrication which is not available at any facility in Australia. He subsequently brought these devices and wafers back to Australia for characterisation and measurement as part of a continued collaboration between the research group at UNSW and the QUTech group at TU Delft.
2016 Scholarship winner: Brianna Ganly
Brianna used the travel scholarship to travel to the University of Guelph (UoG) in Canada to work with their PIXE group, led by Professor J.L. Campbell, a world-leading expert on PIXE and X-ray Physics, and a co-investigator on the Mars Rover ‘Curiosity’s Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) instrument at UoG.
She is now the CSIRO team leader of the X-ray Science team within the Sensing and Sorting research program.
The CSIRO Alumni Scholarship in Physics provides recipients with support to travel to collaborate with a key research leader in their field. The competition for the scholarship has been very strong since its establishment in 2015. Consequently, the recipients are an impressive cohort of researchers at the cutting edge of Australian research, each working on a research topic that is both scientifically interesting as well as potentially impacting on our world future.
Read the history of the CSIRO Alumni Physics Scholarship and learn more about our speakers and the research they are working on.