Two-dimensional materials (2DM), derived from bulk layered crystals with covalent intra-layer bonding and weak van der Waals (vdW) interlayer coupling, offer a versatile playground for creating quantum materials with properties tailored for particular applications. This is achieved by combining different atomically thin 2DM crystals into heterostructures layer-by-layer in a chosen sequence. Unlike conventional crystal growth, this technique is not limited by lattice matching or interface chemistry, hence, it enables us to build heterostructures from several dozens of readily available vdW crystals with diverse physical properties (electronic, optical or magnetic). This platform offers broadly acknowledged potential for the realisation of nano-devices and designer meta-materials with new properties and functionalities determined by the coupling of adjacent layers, including interlayer band hybridisation and strong proximity effects. A new degree of freedom for controlling the properties of vdW heterostructures is the mutual crystal rotation - twist - of the constituent 2D crystals. Together with the lattice mismatch of the adjacent 2D crystals it gives rise to the moiré superlattice (mSL): a periodic variation of the local atomic registry, with the period controlled by the twist angle. Even a small twist can lead to remarkable changes in the properties of heterostructures - for instance, in homobilayers of 2DM it leads to strong spectrum reconstruction and formation of electron and hole minibands. So far, the breakthrough studies of moiré superlattices have been focused on graphene heterostructures with hexagonal boron nitride and on twisted graphene bilayers. Recently, initial exploration of twisted layers of transition metal dichalcogenides have begun, featuring four letters in a single issue of Nature in March 2019 (in one of those the members of this consortium have reported moire minibands for excitons). Not surprisingly, these recent developments have fuelled a world-wide race to develop this new field of materials science and solid state physics, branded as 'twistronics'. This project will pioneer the new scientific area of twistronics in novel types of 2DM heterostructures, mapping out the limits to which one can control their properties through the interlayer proximity and moiré superlattice effects. Using this approach, we aim to engineer flat electronic bands in semiconducting 2DM heterostructures, promoting quantum many-body effects, which we will explore through quantum transport and optical studies. Furthermore, we will realise the world-first twisted bilayers of new emerging 2DMs that exhibit strongly correlated states in their natural form ((anti)ferromagnetic, charge-density waves, or superconductivity) and explore novel physics in those system with an outlook for practical applications. In all material combinations, we will look into two distinct cases of (1) intermediate twist angles, where lattices are expected to behave as rigid solids, producing smooth variation in interlayer registry and (2) small twist angles where we have recently found that twisted 2D materials reconstruct to form extended commensurate domains separated by stacking faults. To achieve the ambitious and game-changing goals of this proposal, the consortium will employ a recently commissioned world-first nanofabrication facility, which allows assembly of van der Waals heterostructures in ultra-high vacuum. This unique instrument will provide the game-changing quality materials necessary for this project. Funding of this proposal will allow us to fully employ the potential of this new instrument and deliver ground-breaking new research and disruptive technologies.

To reduce society's dependence on petroleum based non-renewable polymers, large scale utilization of naturally occurring, abundantly available polymers such as cellulose needs to be developed. One of the major challenges in large scale utilization of cellulose from biomass is dissolution and processing of cellulose to prepare downstream products such as high performance textile fibres. The Viscose method is the most common way to manufacture cellulose fibres; however, it is a complex, multistep process which involves use of very aggressive chemicals and requires a large volume of fresh water. In the 1970s, petroleum based synthetic polymer fibres such as polyester and nylon were commercialised and were proven to be more economical than producing cellulose fibres via the Viscose method. Hence, the production of cellulose fibres was reduced from over 1.3 million tons per year in 1973 to 0.4 million tons per year by 2008 (Source: International Rayon and Synthetic Fibres Committee). To overcome this issue of processing of cellulose we are proposing to develop an environmentally benign method of manufacturing of high performance cellulose fibres using "Green Solvents". The proposed research will help develop sustainable and high performance cellulose fibres which can in-principle replace heavy glass fibres (which requires high energy during its manufacturing) and non-renewable polymer precursors used for manufacturing of carbon fibres which are widely used in composites for aerospace, auto, sports and wind energy industries in UK and abroad.

The field of Atomic, Molecular and Optical (AMO) physics holds the promise of unlocking some of the deepest secrets of the universe. It straddles the gap between the mysterious, quantum world, and the world of chemistry which determines much of our lived experience. While several software tools exist to probe particular niches, there is only a very limited and uncoordinated effort to consolidate these disparate strands of development. In this project I will bring together my expertise in this scientific area with an ever-growing network of researchers therein to assemble a useable, sustainable and impactful toolset for researchers. The main outcome of the project will be a computational package (PARAMOR) which is accessible to a large number of non-expert users, which may be developed sustainably by the community, and which will consolidate previously disparate development strands into a concerted effort. The package will run the most sophisticated high-performance AMO physics computer codes under the surface and provide a clean and easy-to-use interface to the user for designing and running simulations, and for processing and rendering their outputs. The main impact will be to inaugurate a vibrant, global user-community of AMO physics codes that reverses the 'normal' tendency for scientific codes to stagnate, or become increasingly specialised, and create a truly sustainable and impactful resource for physics research generally. The current status-quo in AMO computational physics is for very gifted lone developers or small teams to build immensely complex and very capable software, which is practically inaccessible to outsiders. This project will thus act to bridge the gap and allow the potential impact of these separate efforts to be realised, as well as bringing the benefits of modern software development techniques into the AMO physics world.

Many different analytical techniques are commonly applied in the scientific analysis of heritage objects in order to elucidate their material properties. Each technique has advantages and disadvantages in terms of the type of information returned, complexity and expense, sample preparation requirements and applicability to different types of material objects. While X-ray fluorescence (XRF) is very useful in providing elemental information, and techniques such as Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy can yield phase information, only X-ray diffraction (XRD) allows the definitive and unambiguous identification of crystallographic phases. Despite this, the use of XRD in archaeometry has been relatively sporadic and of utility only in niche areas, largely because of sample preparation requirements. This project aims to bring exciting advances in non-destructive XRD techniques to the archaeometric analysis of cultural heritage and archaeological artefacts. The innovative XRD methods developed by the applicants enable high resolution XRD analysis of objects with no sample preparation requirement at all. While twenty years ago sampling of artefacts was considered standard practice, the growth of non-destructive techniques such as handheld XRF have made curators at museums and other collections very much less willing to allow invasive procedures. Maintaining the physical integrity of heritage artefacts is now considered to be of paramount importance. There are certain classes of heritage objects for which destructive sampling is currently the only realistic approach to determining provenance. Stone artefacts are a primary example. Many stone objects in Western Museums are from the art market and doubts have been expressed about the authenticity of many. The most effective method of provenancing stone artefacts is the detailed characterisation of the mineralogical composition in order to identify the geological source, but destructive sampling is nearly always currently required for this purpose. A second major application area is the identification of pigments in fine art paintings and on painted objects such as mummy portraits and Indian miniatures. Although Raman spectroscopy can successfully identify a significant proportion of pigments, there remain an important number for which the method is ineffective. Pigments have unique diffraction pattern fingerprints and XRD studies can provide the critical information for essentially all pigments. The study of stone artefacts and of paintings and painted artefacts will form a major focus of the proposed project. Currently, this innovative XRD technique requires synchrotron facilities for implementation. The applicants will demonstrate the method using cutting-edge high-resolution X-ray detectors (superconducting transition-edge sensor arrays) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US in proof-of-principle experiments. This work will support the eventual transition of the technique away from synchrotrons and into the laboratory and museum. An additional aim is to investigate the archaeometric capability of a prototype handheld XRD instrument, based on the same underlying technique but having much lower resolution. Previous work with this prototype device strongly suggests that the analysis of metallic heritage objects is an especially promising area. The avoidance of the need to extract samples from high-value and rare objects is a highly-significant advantage and is applicable in other research areas. These include palaeontology and the study of meteorites and planetary materials brought to Earth by sample-return missions.

A Fire Safety Strategy is an essential component of the design for a building. It ensures that in the event of a fire, building occupants can be evacuated safely. The main consideration in these strategies is time. The engineer must show that all occupants can evacuate the building without being exposed to the fire. This is particularly difficult in the case of tall buildings where occupants must travel long distances downward before they can exit the building. A rule of thumb to estimate total building evacuation time is one minute per floor. By this rule the 828m, 162 floor Burj Khalifa in Dubai would take more than 2.5 hours to fully evacuate. The 159m, 31 storey TVCC tower in Beijing was engulfed in a fire which spread up the entire height of the building within 15 minutes of ignition. Clearly, it would not have been possible to evacuate occupants in sufficient time to save them from this fire. It is therefore necessary to have a specific Fire Safety Strategy for these unique buildings.Firstly, the fire must be prevented from spreading vertically, confined to one floor for as long as possible, so occupants on floors far enough from the fire can remain safely in the building until the fire is extinguished or runs out of fuel. Secondly, the building must remain standing, again so that people still in the building and the emergency responders that enter it to fight the fire do not perish as in the World Trade Center disaster. Thirdly, the vertical escape routes must remain structurally intact and smoke free to allow safe passage of occupants from the building. If occupants cannot reach the outside of the building in a timely fashion, then the vertical escape routes must act as the outside and once reached, guarantee safety. To provide these three crucial elements and ensure the safety of occupants of tall buildings, designers must be able to approximate in a quantitative manner the fires expected to occur in these buildings. With optimal use of space being the driving force behind these designs, floors often consist of large, open plan compartments. According to the CTBUH, 82% of the tallest 100 buildings are partially or completely office use (62% completely). Fires in large open plan spaces tend not to cover the entire area of the compartment at any instant but instead propagate across it. These fires have been labelled "travelling fires" and given the statistics, it should be expected that these would be typical fires for tall buildings. Despite this, current methods of prescribing fires are based on data obtained with small homogeneously heated 4mx4m (approx) compartments. These methods, used since the beginning of the 20th Century, are still applied to all structures irrespective of their nature.Current state-of-the-art research shows that a realistic definition of the fire is essential to safely provide all three critical components of the Fire Safety Strategy but also that our current analytical and computational tools cannot provide this. This means we cannot provide an adequate quantitative assessment of the Fire Safety Strategy for tall buildings. Designers are thus not capable of assessing if safety measures introduced result in an under or over dimensioned building. Given the level of optimisation required for tall buildings, this is clearly an important weakness in the design process. As large-scale fire testing cannot be done for all possible building configurations, safe designs can only be achieved using properly validated tools. With no sufficiently detailed test data, fire models cannot be said to have been performance assessed, verified and validated for these scenarios. Real data is needed to establish modelling capabilities and identify problems, thus an integrated modelling/testing programme is essential. This project will conduct a series of tests and modelling studies to establish a methodology that generates real fire inputs for the safe definition of a Fire Safety Strategy for tall buildings.