About me, about that ...

I am a physicist (originally astrophysist) currently working as a Research Fellow at Imperial College London in the Department of Materials, where I conduct research into room-temperature masers / quantum materials and lecture in mathematics.

I worked in the space industry for a fair few years – designing passive microwave equipment for spacecraft payloads – until I returned to academia to do a PhD in materials physics.

My PhD focussed on microwave absorption in metal-oxides, using density functional theory to predict phonon dispersion and anharmonic phonon-phonon interactions. These results were fed into a quantum field theory of anharmonic phonons and compared (successfully) to measured properties of real metal-oxide crystals.

My main research interests are electro-magnetics, materials physics, numerical modeling, spin-physics and cavity quantum electrodynamics.

I am co-inventor of the room-temperature solid-state maser and have recently been dedicating my time to improving the devices through better understanding of the spin-physics and electro-magnetic design. Our maser research team is very interdisciplinary – combining the efforts of physicists, chemists and engineers.

As well as getting stuck into mathematics on the theory side, my industrial experience means that I am also quite handy at conducting experiments. I use code to enhance my efforts in both – from parallel high performance and GPU computing to writing drivers for instrumentation.

I mostly use C/C++, Python and Julia for these purposes, but also code in JavaScript (HTML and Node.js), Perl, and Fortran. Back in the day I coded in machine-code/assembler (Z80, 6502, 68000), but those days are past.

Imperial College Personal Web Page

This blog is my attempt to open-source some of the stuff that is either laying dormant on my computer, scribbled on some paper or is sloshing about in my head.