Exploding stars, or supernovae, are important probes of the extragalactic universe, from finding the lowest metallicity environments, to studying the large-scale dynamical effects of dark energy. However, many aspects of supernovae as a population of events remain unclear, including the variety of supernova types, their luminosities, and their progenitor stars. This project will use data from two large, recently-completed surveys of supernovae - the Dark Energy Survey and the OzDES survey - to probe and understand the statistics of the supernova population. These data, on thousands of supernova explosions, will be the first census of the high-redshift explosive transient population, with a particular focus on the diversity of the core collapse supernova population. These results will then be used to prepare for two major new facilities that will revolutionise the study of supernovae. The first is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), an 8-m survey telescope that will image the whole sky every 2-5 days, and which will find new supernova explosions at an unprecedented rate. The second is the ESO 4MOST multi-object spectrograph, which will study thousands of supernova explosions and their host galaxies in great detail as part of its TIme Domain Extragalactic Survey (TIDES). Our project will provide the data needed to optimise these two experiments, enabling us to ensure that the combination of facilities will provide the ultimate cosmological sample of type Ia supernovae, and probe completely new parts of time-domain parameter space.

The project will explore fundamental open questions in high-energy theoretical physics using cutting edge techniques from quantum field theory.

Advanced characterisation of next generation battery cathode materials using X-rays

Optical fibres have transformed our modern world. They form the backbone of our telecommunication network and have enabled high power lasers used in manufacturing. There is a huge amount of technology that is now possible due to the development of the optical fibre. This project seeks to develop a manufacturing approach for the next generation of optical fibre. Rather than a single flexible strand of glass, we look to manufacture flexible glass sheets. These glass sheets will have similar properties as current optical fibre but the additional width dimension will allow new technology to be realised. For example, the glass sheet can be internally structured to manipulate light. Applications of this ability would include next generation of augmented reality eyewear, quantum computers, telecommunication infrastructure and new potentially higher power lasers. This technology could be transformative for communications, computation and engineering sectors.

The Machine-To-Machine (M2M) applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are set to offer many new capabilities in the EPSRC themes of 'Healthcare technologies', 'Living with environmental change' and 'Global uncertainties', granting significant societal and economic benefits. These networks comprise a number of geographically-separated sensor nodes, which collect information from their environment and exchange it using wireless transmissions. However, these networks cannot as yet be employed in demanding applications, because current sensor nodes cannot remain powered for a sufficient length of time without employing batteries that are prohibitively large, heavy or expensive. In this work, we aim to achieve an order-of-magnitude extension to the battery charge-time of WSNs and WBANs by facilitating a significant reduction in the main cause of their energy consumption, namely the energy used to transmit information between the sensor nodes. A reduction in the sensor nodes' transmission energy is normally prevented, because this results in corrupted transmitted information owing to noise or interference. However, we will maintain reliable communication when using a low transmit energy by specifically designing channel code implementations that can be employed in the sensor nodes to correct these transmission errors. Although existing channel code implementations can achieve this objective, they themselves may have a high energy consumption, which can erode the transmission energy reduction they afford. Therefore, in this work we will aim for achieving a beneficial step change in the energy consumption of channel code implementations so that their advantages are maintained when employed in energy-constrained wireless communication systems, such as the M2M applications of WSNs and WBANs. We shall achieve this by facilitating a significant reduction in the supply voltage that is used to power the channel code implementations. A reduction in the supply voltage is normally prevented, because this reduces the speed of the implementation and causes the processed information to become corrupted, when its operations can no longer be performed within the allotted time. However, we will maintain reliable operation when using a low supply voltage, by specifically designing the proposed channel code implementations to use their inherent error correction ability to correct not only transmission errors, but also these timing errors. To the best of our knowledge, this novel approach has never been attempted before, despite its significant benefits. Furthermore, we will develop methodologies to allow the designers of WSNs and WBANs to estimate the energy consumption of the proposed channel code implementations, without having to fabricate them. This will allow other researchers to promptly optimise the design of the proposed channel code implementations to suit their energy-constrained wireless communication systems, such as WSNs and WBANs. Using this approach, we will demonstrate how the channel coding algorithm and implementation can be holistically designed, in order to find the most desirable trade-off between complexity and performance.