We will launch a new CDT, focused on composite materials and manufacturing, to deliver the next generation of composites research and technology leaders equipped with the skills to make an impact on society. In recent times, composites have been replacing traditional materials, e.g. metals, at an unprecedented rate. Global growth in their use is expected to be rapid (5-10% annually). This growth is being driven by the need to lightweight structures for which 'lighter is better', e.g. aircraft, automotive car bodywork and wind blades; and by the benefits that composites offer to functionalise both materials and structures. The drivers for lightweighting are mainly material cost, fuel efficiency, reducing emissions contributing to climate change, but also for more purely engineering reasons such as improved operational performance and functionality. For example, the UK composites sector has contributed significantly to the Airbus A400M and A350 airframes, which exhibit markedly better performance over their metallic counterparts. Similarly, in the wind energy field, typically, over 90% of a wind turbine blade comprises composites. However, given the trend towards larger rotors, weight and stiffness have become limiting factors, necessitating a greater use of carbon fibre. Advanced composites, and the possibility that they offer to add extra functionality such as shape adaptation, are enablers for lighter, smarter blades, and cheaper more abundant energy. In the automotive sector, given the push for greener cars, the need for high speed, production line-scale, manufacturing approaches will necessitate more understanding of how different materials perform. Given these developments, the UK has invested heavily in supporting the science and technology of composite materials, for instance, through the establishment of the National Composites Centre at the University of Bristol. Further investments are now required to support the skills element of the UK provision towards the composites industry and the challenges it presents. Currently, there is a recognised skills shortage in the UK's technical workforce for composites; the shortage being particularly acute for doctoral skills (30-150/year are needed). New developments within industry, such as robotic manufacture, additive manufacture, sustainability and recycling, and digital manufacturing require training that encompasses engineering as well as the physical sciences. Our CDT will supply a highly skilled workforce and technical leadership to support the industry; specifically, the leadership to bring forth new radical thinking and the innovative mind-set required to future-proof the UK's global competitiveness. The development of future composites, competing with the present resins, fibres and functional properties, as well as alternative materials, will require doctoral students to acquire underpinning knowledge of advanced materials science and engineering, and practical experience of the ensuing composites and structures. These highly skilled doctoral students will not only need to understand technical subjects but should also be able to place acquired knowledge within the context of the modern world. Our CDT will deliver this training, providing core engineering competencies, including the experimental and theoretical elements of composites engineering and science. Core engineering modules will seek to develop the students' understanding of the performance of composite materials, and how that performance might be improved. Alongside core materials, manufacturing and computational analysis training, the CDT will deliver a transferable skills training programme, e.g. communication, leadership, and translational research skills. Collaborating with industrial partners (e.g. Rolls Royce) and world-leading international expertise (e.g. University of Limerick), we will produce an exciting integrated programme enabling our students to become future leaders.

The subject of geometry begins with the Greek mathematician Euclid who studied relationships among distances and angles, first in a plane and then in a space. About 200 years ago, Gauss and Riemann opened the door of modern geometry. They studied geometry on the more general notion of "manifold''. This is a space which is not necessarily flat, although locally it is like an Euclidean space, e.g. a sphere. The geometry studied by them is called Riemannian geometry, which is the mathematical foundation of Einstein's general relativity. In the study of Physics, people find that, in some situations, we need modifications of Riemannian geometry. One direction is complex geometry, where the the local model is a complex plane instead of a real plane. Another generalization is symplectic geometry, where we change the notion of metrics, i.e. distances and angles, to a 2-form. On a plane, it is just the area form. The idea of symplectic geometry made an implicit appearance already in the work of Lagrange on analytical mechanics and later in Jacobi's and Hamilton's formulation of classical mechanics. It is Herman Weyl who first uses the word it symplectic in his book Classical Groups. It is derived from a Greek word meaning complex, a word already used in mathematics with a different meaning. In the study of String Theory, a theory providing a possible model for our universe, these two geometries come together to provide mathematical foundations. The proposed research studies the global property of symplectic manifolds and the interactions with complex manifolds. Enriques and Kodaira described the birational classification of complex surfaces, i.e. complex 2-manifolds. The surfaces are divided into four categories according to their Kodaira dimensions, which take values negative infinity, 0, 1, and 2. The Minimal Model Program (Mori program) aims to generalize these results to higher dimensional complex projective varieties. This program is complete in dimension 3 in 1980s and is known to work for complex projective varieties of general type recently. Symplectic topology is a subject concerning important global questions of symplectic manifolds. Comparing to complex manifolds, the topology of symplectic manifolds, even in dimension 4, is far more wild. For example, any finitely presented group can be realized as the fundamental group of a symplectic 4-manifold. Hence in symplectic topology, we have many more objectives to study than complex manifolds. There are two natural ways to extend the birational classification and other aspects of birational geometry to symplectic manifolds. The first is to fix a symplectic structure. We study how the geometry and topology are changing under simple birational operations like the symplectic blow-up/blow-down and symplectic deformations. This is called the symplectic birational geometry. The techniques and flavours of this subject are more or less topological which gives a lot of flexibility. The other way is to fix an almost complex structure tamed by a symplectic form. This is called the almost complex algebraic geometry, which is more rigid. We plan to use the theory of J-holomorphic curves to generalize the relevant part of algebraic geometry (in particular the Nakai-Moishezon and Kleiman dualities, the cone theorem and linear systems) to symplectic manifolds of dimension 4. Techniques and interactions from different disciplines, e.g. low dimensional topology, algebraic geometry, differential geometry, complex geometry and symplectic topology, are very crucial for this project.

We propose to develop and validate measures of accountability to be shared with the Nepal Ministry of Education (MOE) and to use those measures in an analysis of the determinants of accountability and its association with students' gains in achievement. The proposed study will build on the resources of the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS), a 20-year ongoing panel study of 116 schools with 3,000 households with 3,500 school aged children in 151 communities located throughout the Western Chitwan Valley of Nepal. With funding from DFID-ESRC, we are proposing to achieve two aims: Aim One: To Develop and Pretest a Suite of Nepali Accountability Assessment Tools (NAATs) for Use by the MOE and to Pilot these Tools within the Chitwan Valley of Nepal. Importantly, the tools will be designed so that Nepal's MOE can both assess and potentially improve its current accountability processes at multiple levels of the increasingly decentralized Nepalese education system [4]. To achieve this aim we will: (1) develop a variety of accountability assessment tools for use in Nepal's education system; (2) modify a set of instructional processes and instructional quality measures developed for use in OECD countries for use in the Nepali educational system; and (3) gather data on students' academic achievement using standardized test items developed by Nepal's MOE. Aim Two: To Investigate How Accountability Processes; Environments for Student Learning in Schools, Families, and Communities; and Student Learning are Related. This involves investigating three main research questions: Are accountability processes systematically related to socioeconomic disparities among communities, schools within communities, and families within schools? In school and community settings where accountability processes are more intensive, is the quality of instructional service delivery higher? And, controlling for socioeconomic disparities related to student achievement is student learning higher in schools and communities where accountability processes are more intensive? To meet this aim, we will: (1) administer a newly designed PET-QSDS survey to 380 key stakeholders; (2) administer the NASA test at the beginning and end of the school year and a student survey to 1,740 8th graders; and (3) administer a teacher survey to 1,392 teachers and a parent survey to 1,740 parents. The results of this research will be relevant to education policy makers in Nepal and will also contribute directly to comparative education research on school effectiveness. This study will generate rigorous scientific outcomes: (1) development of a low income context adaptive accountability assessment tool; (2) cross-cultural assessment of the reliability and predictive validity of accountability measures; (3) identification of contextual factors with strong correlation with accountability; (4) potential for identification of new dimensions of accountability in low income settings; and (5) scientific advancement in our understanding of the relationship between accountability, instructional quality and students' gains in achievement. These outcomes will be made widely available to scientists and policy makers. First, we will conduct dissemination workshops at local and national levels to share findings of the study and provide training on the use of the newly designed accountability assessment tool and analysis of the data generated through the various surveys mentioned above. Second, the data will be made available through ICPSR and the UK Data Service. Third, the findings will be disseminated through presentations at national and international conferences and published in scientific articles, and research and policy briefs. Finally, the participation of Nepali faculty, scientists, government representatives and school authorities throughout the project will advance the scientific and analytical capacity of their respective host institutions (DOE,TU, PABSON, PDs).

III-V compound semiconductor materials are increasingly important for the development of many modern materials applications and in particular optoelectronic and electronic devices. These include materials for laser diodes, light emitting diodes (LEDs), photovoltaics & photodetectors, avalanche photodiodes, THz emitters & detectors, heterojunction bipolar transistors, and spintronic devices. Over the years several elements from the III-V system have been investigated to advance these material systems in order to persistently progress towards superior devices and to exploit novel material properties for advanced device applications. It is particularly important and timely to develop new materials which improve the operating efficiency of devices and reduce energy consumption. For example, the unexpected runaway success of GaN alloys as a new class of semiconductor materials for LEDs (e.g. in solid-state lighting) and high temperature/high power electronics has inspired research into whether other previously overlooked semiconductor alloys offer similar opportunities for different applications. An example of a relatively unexplored family of semiconductor materials is the alloys of the heaviest naturally occurring group V element, bismuth. Bismuth is the heaviest non-radioactive element in the periodic table, and unusually for the heavy elements, it is non-toxic and relatively inexpensive, meaning it has found application in elemental form in fire-safety systems (due to its low melting point) and thermocouples. Furthermore, since spin orbit splitting increases super linearly with atomic number, Bi-alloys have a very large spin orbit splitting compared with conventional semiconductor alloys, and thus presents interesting opportunities for new types of electronic devices based on electron spin. Consequently III-V bismides offer many new prospects in the area of materials research and the opportunity to develop an innovative class of materials for the expansion of science and technology. Some of the strategic attributes offered by III-V bismide materials are: i) the potential to cover near infrared (IR) wavelengths up to 3 um on GaAs substrates and all wavelengths beyond 2 um on GaSb substrates, ii) a uniquely large spin orbit splitting which provides an opportunity for semiconductor spintronic devices, iii) a spin orbit band offset that is typically larger than bandgap energy which provides an opportunity to develop active materials with significantly reduced Auger recombination, iv) a small temperature dependence of the band gap energy that offers improved temperature stability for emitters and detectors, and v) the opportunity for band offset engineering that offers substantial improvement for hole confinement in GaSb based mid IR diode lasers. To further exploit and develop these various possibilities, an international team of theorists and experimentalists with expertise in materials and devices is proposed. This team is expected to rapidly advance science, technology, and education in the area of III-V bismide materials and devices for optoelectronic applications, the potential for which is very large.

Current high-power lasers focus light to intensities up to 10^23 times higher than the intensity of sunlight at the surface of the Earth. At these extreme intensities the electrons are quickly stripped from the atoms in any matter in the laser focus, generating a plasma. However, as intensities increase from the peak reached today (2x10^22W/cm^2) to those expected to be reached on next-generation facilities such as the Extreme Light Infrastructure (>10^23W/cm^2), due to become operational by 2017, the behaviour of this plasma dramatically alters. At intensities >5x10^22W/cm^-2 the electromagnetic fields in the laser focus are predicted to accelerate the electrons in the plasma so violently that they prolifically radiate gamma-ray photons. These photons can carry away so much energy that the electron's motion is affected by the resulting energy loss and the radiation reaction force (the force the particle exerts on itself as it radiates) becomes significant in determining the plasma's macroscopic dynamics. The laser's electromagnetic fields are so strong that quantum electrodynamics effects also become important. In this case the radiation reaction force no longer behaves deterministically, i.e. instead of knowing the electron's trajectory exactly as in the classical picture, we now can only know the probability that the electron has a given trajectory. In addition, the gamma-ray photons can be converted into electron-positron pairs, these pairs can emit further photons which emit more pairs and an avalanche of antimatter production can ensue with strong consequences for the behaviour of the plasma as a whole. The interplay of radiation reaction, QED effects and ultra-relativistic plasma processes will define the physics of laser-matter interactions in this new 'QED-plasma' regime, but is currently poorly understood. We will elucidate the basic theory of laser propagation and absorption in QED-plasmas. This will provide the foundational theory describing laser matter interactions moving beyond today's intensity frontier and into the foreseeable future. This theory will be underpinned by experiments measuring the rates of the important QED processes for the first time. The new theory will then be used to design the first experiments to generate a QED plasma in the laboratory. This project will culminate in the first generation of a QED-plasma, usually only seen in extreme astrophysical environments such as pulsar magnetospheres, in the laboratory.