Talks

Accurate redshift calibration and physically motivated source sample selection are central challenges for precision weak lensing cosmology. In this talk, I will present our recent work on forward modelling redshift distributions and inferring physical properties of weak lensing galaxies in the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS-1000) using a generative model for the galaxy population. The framework enabling this work is pop-cosmos, a calibrated galaxy population model that allows principled Bayesian inference of individual galaxy redshifts and physical properties for millions of KiDS-1000 sources. Validation against spectroscopic samples demonstrates low bias and scatter in the inferred photometric redshifts, while physical property inference enables the construction of weak lensing catalogues that mitigate intrinsic alignment systematics. We also develop a forward-modelling framework to infer the redshift distributions of the KiDS-1000 galaxies. By applying a KiDS data and survey selection model to synthetic photometric data of mock pop-cosmos galaxies, we directly characterize the redshift distributions in each of the five tomographic bins of KiDS-1000, thereby bypassing the need for spectroscopic reweighting used in conventional redshift calibration methods. Overall, our results demonstrate how the pop-cosmos galaxy population model can deliver accurate redshift distributions as well as galaxy properties, crucial for connecting galaxy evolution physics and weak lensing cosmology with Rubin LSST and Euclid.

• Speaker: Dr Anik Halder (University of Cambridge)
• Wednesday 18 March 2026, 13:45-14:15
• Venue: Hoyle Lecture theatre + Zoom .
• Series: Institute of Astronomy Seminars; organiser: Cristiano Longarini.

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We present an emulator that predicts the 3D climate of rocky exoplanets in milliseconds, with calibrated uncertainties. Trained on simulations from multiple GCMs, it produces spatially resolved fields of temperature, humidity, winds, clouds, and radiation across a broad space of planet properties, including M-dwarf to G-star hosts and snowball worlds to moist greenhouses. Emulator errors are comparable to or smaller than the disagreement between GCMs themselves.

• Speaker: Edward Stevenson (University of Cambridge)
• Wednesday 18 March 2026, 13:15-13:40
• Venue: Hoyle Lecture theatre + Zoom .
• Series: Institute of Astronomy Seminars; organiser: Cristiano Longarini.

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Many spectacular phenomena in the high-energy Universe, such as bright, rapid gamma-ray flares, are powered by complex collective plasma processes around relativistic objects: neutron stars and black holes. While our understanding of such processes has greatly benefitted from traditional (space, solar, laboratory) plasma research, the physical conditions near black holes and neutron stars are so extreme that conventional intuition often fails, and a richer physics framework is required. Extreme astrophysical plasmas are relativistic, interact strongly with radiation, and may be subject to QED (e.g., pair-production) effects. Understanding how this additional physics affects collective plasma processes (waves and instabilities, magnetic reconnection, turbulence, etc.) is the main goal of Extreme Plasma Astrophysics. Exploration of this new exciting frontier is now advancing rapidly, thanks to strong observational motivation, vigorous theoretical efforts, and the advent of novel first-principles relativistic kinetic plasma simulation codes incorporating radiation and QED effects. Laser-plasma experiments will soon also contribute to this revolution. In this talk, I will review the recent progress in this burgeoning new field, focusing on theoretical and computational studies of relativistic radiative magnetic reconnection and turbulence and their astrophysical applications to neutron-star magnetospheres and black-hole coronae and jets. I will also outline key theoretical challenges and future directions of Extreme Plasma Astrophysics.

• Speaker: Prof. Dmitri A. Uzdensky (University of Oxford)
• Monday 16 March 2026, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: MR14 DAMTP and online.
• Series: DAMTP Astrophysics Seminars; organiser: David Hosking.

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Extremal black holes are known to develop a horizon instability in the presence of scalar matter. In this talk, I will discuss how this picture extends to charged perturbations, where the nonlinearities of both Maxwell’s equations and Einstein’s equations lead to qualitatively new behavior. In particular, I will give numerical evidence that dynamical extremal black holes act as universal threshold solutions of the Einstein-Maxwell-scalar field system. These threshold solutions can be understood from the perspective of critical phenomena, with horizon instabilities emerging in the appropriate limit. I will then present numerical results on the existence of arbitrarily large curvatures in the (near-)extremal interior. This curvature may be visible from future null infinity in spacetimes without a black hole region. Based on arXiv:2602.11256.

• Speaker: Zach Gelles (Princeton University)
• Friday 20 March 2026, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: Potter Room / Zoom : https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/85131795570.
• Series: DAMTP Friday GR Seminar; organiser: Lorenzo Gavassino.

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Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS), thanks to its depth, excellent imaging and multi-wavelength coverage (jointly with VIKING ), allows us to go beyond cosmic shear analyses. I will present how we extract and employ both low- and high-redshift galaxies and quasars from KiDS, taking advantage of its considerable overlap with various spectroscopic calibration datasets, such as GAMA and now also DESI . In selecting these objects and estimating their photometric redshifts, we use in particular machine-learning approaches including deep learning, and I will discuss our recent results in this matter. I will then overview some of the recent applications of these KiDS photometric galaxies and quasars, based on probes such as galaxy-galaxy lensing and clustering. Time permitting, I will also sketch near-future prospects of extending this kind of studies beyond KiDS with new surveys such as 4MOST and LSST .

• Speaker: Maciej Bilicki (Warsaw, CFT)
• Monday 16 March 2026, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: CMS, Pav. B, CTC Common Room (B1.19) [Potter Room].
• Series: Cosmology Lunch; organiser: Gonzalo Villa.

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(remote)

Biology’s roots in the description of diversity and function have led to a fact-rich empirical understanding of life, which unpacks to statistical reconstructions of Natural History and quite sophisticated mechanistic analyses of structure and function in living systems. The Darwinian pivot, from the previous pinnacle of Humboldtian naturalism and explicitly contra Lamarck, created, from whole cloth, a category of cause acting after the generation of change-events, and parallel to impetus-related notions, in which cause is the origin of change events, that had been the basis of physical theorizing from John of Alexandria through Galileo and then Newton. Darwinian ex-post causation through selection is a close cousin to notions of cause now extensively developed in information theory, which have also back-filled the modern physical theory of matter via thermodynamic ideas.

The foregoing facts, methods, and concepts, as they have been used so far, provide a partial window on the origin of life and its major evolutionary patterns, and an even less-complete framing of the nature of the living state. They have proved to be frustratingly limiting, however, to address questions of the likelihood of life’s emerging as a stage in planetary maturation, of the chance or necessity of any particular living feature, and of the appropriate notion of cause to account for life as a distinctive natural phenomenon. An argument can be made that some of the ideas we need to better address these questions have been developed outside biology, in areas of basic physics, computer science, control engineering, and information theory, where they could be discovered in simpler and more symmetric contexts (and even there, slowly and painfully over more than a century!) and that we can now bring them back into a unified science that includes questions of biological origin, evolution, and nature.

Much of my work has amounted to looking for small, concrete questions about chance, necessity, and cause for different features of life, in which I can give proofs-of-concept for framing the questions in terms of probability, hardness or cost of search, robustness, and related criteria, and use combinatorial tools to propose causal analyses. I have looked at universal core metabolism through this lens for some decades, and recently turned to the origins of macromolecules. Tools include the statistical mechanics of stochastic population processes with stoichiometry (e.g. Chemical Reaction Networks) or generative combinatorial chemistries (e.g. graph grammars). Other interests include basic maths of likelihood in spaces of histories and events, to understand how we should extend thermodynamic concepts, and approaches such as Large Deviation Theory, to the many contexts away from equilibrium where energy conservation may appear but need not be fundamental any longer. Here thermodynamics becomes recognizable as a theory about counting, measuring, and information—albeit discovered and named for the effort to understand heat-generated movement — but not fundamentally about, or limited to, that phenomenal domain.

An overarching question is how we should reason theoretically about complex phenomena in which causation is linked across many scales, in the early stages (where we still are) in which data and essential concepts and insights are still fragmentary and too incomplete to assemble into any coherent worldview.

• Speaker: Eric Smith (Santa Fe Institute)
• Thursday 12 March 2026, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: Battcock, Room F17.
• Series: LCLU Coffee Meetings; organiser: Paul B. Rimmer.

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Black holes are the strangest prediction of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. The boundary around a black hole, known as the event horizon, is incredibly challenging to observe under normal conditions. However when a black hole consumes nearby material, it powers a system emitting partides and light. With a precise enough telescope, we can even see this as a ring of light surrounding a dark depression.

In 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a planet-sized array of radio telescopes, directly imaged this ring around two supermassive black holes. These iconic images mark both a culmination of a century of discovery and the beginning of a new chapter, with implications ranging from galaxy formation to the mystery of the highest energy particles detected on Earth.

In a talk mixing history, results, and personal anecdotes, I will convey the wonder of “seeing” the Universe in a new light, and sometimes with no light at all. I will also explore what lies on the horizon, as multi-messenger observations and advances in theoretical modelling converge on some of the deepest unsolved problems in physics.

• Speaker: Sera Markoff, Plumian Professor in Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy
• Thursday 07 May 2026, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: Hoyle Lecture Theatre, Institute of Astronomy.
• Series: Institute of Astronomy Colloquia; organiser: Joanna Carruthers.

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Black holes are the strangest prediction of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. The boundary around a black hole, known as the event horizon, is incredibly challenging to observe under normal conditions. However when a black hole consumes nearby material, it powers a system emitting partides and light. With a precise enough telescope, we can even see this as a ring of light surrounding a dark depression.

In 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a planet-sized array of radio telescopes, directly imaged this ring around two supermassive black holes. These iconic images mark both a culmination of a century of discovery and the beginning of a new chapter, with implications ranging from galaxy formation to the mystery of the highest energy particles detected on Earth.

In a talk mixing history, results, and personal anecdotes, I will convey the wonder of “seeing” the Universe in a new light, and sometimes with no light at all. I will also explore what lies on the horizon, as multi-messenger observations and advances in theoretical modelling converge on some of the deepest unsolved problems in physics.

• Speaker: Sera Markoff, Plumian Professor in Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy
• Thursday 07 May 2026, 16:00-17:15
• Venue: Hoyle Lecture Theatre, Institute of Astronomy.
• Series: Institute of Astronomy Colloquia; organiser: Joanna Carruthers.

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Black holes are the strangest prediction of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. The boundary around a black hole, known as the event horizon, is incredibly challenging to observe under normal conditions. However when a black hole consumes nearby material, it powers a system emitting partides and light. With a precise enough telescope, we can even see this as a ring of light surrounding a dark depression.

In 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a planet-sized array of radio telescopes, directly imaged this ring around two supermassive black holes. These iconic images mark both a culmination of a century of discovery and the beginning of a new chapter, with implications ranging from galaxy formation to the mystery of the highest energy particles detected on Earth.

In a talk mixing history, results, and personal anecdotes, I will convey the wonder of “seeing” the Universe in a new light, and sometimes with no light at all. I will also explore what lies on the horizon, as multi-messenger observations and advances in theoretical modelling converge on some of the deepest unsolved problems in physics.

• Speaker: Sera Markoff, Plumian Professor in Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy
• Thursday 07 May 2026, 16:00-17:15
• Venue: Hoyle Lecture Theatre, Institute of Astronomy.
• Series: Institute of Astronomy Colloquia; organiser: joanna.carruthers.

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The launch of JWST has enabled atmospheric characterisation of sub-Neptunes more precise than ever. Specifically, its MIRI instrument allows to look for extra absorbers that are hard to find in the near-infrared. Recently this has been showed on temperate sub-Neptunes K2-18 b and TOI -732 c, with potential signs of complex molecules, although the significance of these results has been contested in subsequent works. According to these, the findings could be due to instrument systematics, or even mere random noise. In this context, we aim to disentangle these possibilities by looking at multiple MIRI transit observations, and check whether complex molecules are also found in other planets like hot gas giants.

• Speaker: Martin Binet
• Wednesday 11 March 2026, 13:15-13:40
• Venue: Hoyle Lecture theatre + Zoom .
• Series: Institute of Astronomy Seminars; organiser: Xander Byrne.

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Warps are responsible for various global disc phenomena and observational signatures and have mostly been studied using global hydrodynamical simulations. However, their role in planet formation and affecting dust instabilities is best studied in a local frame. I will present our recent efforts in modelling dusty warps in a local shearing box and show that warps can cause dust instabilities that lead to fast dust concentrations, much faster than the streaming instability. I will also show analytical and modelling efforts to investigate the effects of dust on the parametric instability.

• Speaker: Hossam Aly (TU Delft)
• Monday 09 March 2026, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: MR14 DAMTP and online.
• Series: DAMTP Astrophysics Seminars; organiser: Thomas Jannaud.

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The Milky Way contains of order 100 million stellar-mass black holes. Yet, fewer than 100 black hole candidates are known in the Milky Way, and only about 25 are dynamically confirmed. Our view of the black hole population has been shaped almost entirely by observations of X-ray binaries and gravitational wave sources, both of which represent rare outcomes of binary evolution. I will discuss recent efforts to uncover the much larger population of Galactic black holes in non-interacting binaries, focusing particularly on astrometry from the Gaia mission. Compared to previous surveys, Gaia is revealing post-interaction binaries in wider orbits, whose properties are difficult to explain with standard binary evolution models. I will discuss how the Gaia catalogs can be leveraged for statistical inference, despite their complex selection function, and how they can discriminate between competing formation models.

• Speaker: Kareem El-Badry, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology
• Thursday 12 March 2026, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: Hoyle Lecture Theatre, IoA (tea at 3:30 pm).
• Series: The Eddington Lectures ; organiser: Ruby Ng.

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Warps are responsible for various global disc phenomena and observational signatures and have mostly been studied using global hydrodynamical simulations. However, their role in planet formation and affecting dust instabilities is best studied in a local frame. I will present our recent efforts in modelling dusty warps in a local shearing box and show that warps can cause dust instabilities that lead to fast dust concentrations, much faster than the streaming instability. I will also show analytical and modelling efforts to investigate the effects of dust on the parametric instability.

• Speaker: Hossam Aly, TU Delft
• Wednesday 11 March 2026, 13:45-14:15
• Venue: Hoyle Lecture theatre + Zoom .
• Series: Institute of Astronomy Seminars; organiser: Cristiano Longarini.

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Cosmological phase transitions are fascinating events taking place in the first instants of the Universe. First order transitions proceeding via the nucleation of bubbles are of particular interest as they can lead to a strong departure from thermal equilibrium, with important implications for the generation of the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry as well as for the production of primordial gravitational waves. These properties strongly depend on the dynamics controlling bubble nucleation: in a homogenous Universe, critical bubbles formed out of thermal or quantum fluctuations are expected to be spherical in shape, with a nucleation probability that is the same everywhere. This picture, however, can dramatically change if the Universe contains impurities, or seeds, that can exponentially enhance the nucleation rate in their vicinity. In this talk, I will discuss the general idea behind seeded phase transitions, and provide few natural examples where topological defects, such as strings and domain walls, can play the role of impurities in the early Universe.

• Speaker: Simone Blasi (DESY)
• Monday 09 March 2026, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: CMS, Pav. B, CTC Common Room (B1.19) [Potter Room].
• Series: Cosmology Lunch; organiser: Gonzalo Villa.

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We do not understand 95% of our Universe. 63% of this unknown is dark energy (or a cosmological constant), which drives the accelerated expansion of the universe and 27% is dark matter, an additional matter component which clumps together to form large halos around visible galaxies. These two dominating components of the universe have only been observed through their gravitational effects, and both represent the failure of our standard models of particle physics and gravity to explain cosmology from a fundamental physics standpoint. In this talk I will focus on the introduction of new light scalar fields which have been suggested as possible explanations for dark matter and the accelerated expansion of the universe. I will show examples of the unusual phenomenology that can arise in such theories, and explain why properties of macroscopic objects, such as density and compactness, are important in understanding how to detect them. I’ll then show how this leads to new opportunities for precision laboratory measurements to shed light on this type of new physics.

• Speaker: Professor Clare Burrage - Nottingham
• Wednesday 11 March 2026, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: MR3.
• Series: Theoretical Physics Colloquium; organiser: Amanda Stagg.

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Boson stars (BSs)— self-gravitating configurations of a complex scalar field— provide a simple, numerically tractable model for a class of exotic compact objects (ECOs). I will discuss two recent works showing how dynamical evolutions of spacetimes involving BSs can be used to address theoretical and observational challenges related to ECOs. First, I will cover how evolutions of a class of ultracompact BSs, which possess a pair of light rings, find no evidence for the efficacy of a conjectured dynamical instability affecting ultraompact objects, thus presenting the first long-term stable evolutions of black hole mimickers and raising the possibility that a population of such objects could exist in the universe. Secondly, I will discuss results from a study of black hole-boson star binary mergers, focusing on prospects for attempts to build gravitational wave template banks for astrophysical ECO searches in a model-agnostic manner. 

• Speaker: Gareth Marks (DAMTP)
• Friday 06 March 2026, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: Potter Room / Zoom : https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/85131795570.
• Series: DAMTP Friday GR Seminar; organiser: Lorenzo Gavassino.

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Superconducting spintronics is a highly interesting area of research which allows, for example, for the formation of unconventional superconducting states via proximity induced superconductivity in certain magnetic materials.

We have shown that Josephson junctions fabricated from conventional s-wave superconductors that have barriers formed from an intrinsic noncollinear antiferromagnet1 or from magnetic multilayers designed to have magnetic layers with orthogonal magnetizations2 show very high supercurrent critical densities that are indicative of the formation of triplet supercurrents. Another highly interesting finding is the observation of a Josephson Diode effect (JDE)3-5 in both lateral and vertical Josephson junctions where the barrier is formed from a material that breaks both time reversal symmetry and inversion symmetry.

The simplest case is perhaps that of the pure metal platinum that is magnetized at one surface by proximity to an insulating ferromagnet in a direction perpendicular to the supercurrent that is created by niobium electrodes at the opposing surface6.

We find large asymmetries in the supercurrent critical density that increase with decreasing temperature below that of the superconducting ordering temperature of niobium. A more exotic case is where the barrier in lateral Josephson junctions is formed from a type II Dirac semi-metal, NiTe23. The superconducting critical current density shows large asymmetries for current flowing in opposite directions of up to 80% in the presence of small magnetic fields transverse to the supercurrent direction. The barriers can extend to almost a micron in extent and yet still allow for the passage of supercurrents. Similar results are found for barriers formed from PtTe24.

Vertical junctions formed from WTe2 also show a diode-like behavior in the presence of a magnetic field but only when the field is along a direction perpendicular to a mirror plane in the orthorhombic crystal structure of this unusual van der Waals material5. The JDE could form a novel device for reading magnetic nanoscopic objects at ultra low temperatures. Triplet supercurrents that carry spin angular momentum could potentially be used to manipulate magnetization.

Together these two superconducting spintronic effects are highly interesting for potential applications in cryogenic logic and memory that could support quantum computing systems. One of the most interesting applications is for a novel cryogenic form of racetrack memory7*.

References: 1: Jeon, K.-R. et al. Long-range supercurrents through a chiral non-collinear antiferromagnet in lateral Josephson junctions. Nat. Mater. 20, 1358–1363 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01061-9 2: Kindiak, I., Mishra, S. S., Migliorini, A., Pal, B. & Parkin, S. S. P. Reduced decay in Josephson coupling across ferromagnetic junctions with spin–orbit coupling layers. Appl. Phys. Lett. 125, 082601 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0214835 3: Pal, B. et al. Josephson diode effect from Cooper pair momentum in a topological semimetal. Nat. Phys. 18, 1228–1233 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01699-5 4: Sivakumar, P. K. et al. Long-range Phase Coherence and Second Order φ_0-Josephson Effect in a Dirac Semimetal 1T-PtTe2 Comm. Phys. 7, 354 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-024-01825-0 5: Kim, J.-K. et al. Intrinsic supercurrent non-reciprocity coupled to the crystal structure of a van der Waals Josephson barrier. Nat. Commun. 15, 1120 (2024). 6: Jeon, K.-R. et al. Zero-field polarity-reversible Josephson supercurrent diodes enabled by a proximity-magnetized Pt barrier. Nat. Mater. 21, 1008–1013 (2022). 7: Jeon, J.-C., Migliorini, A., Yoon, J., Jeong, J. & Parkin, S. S. P. Multi-core memristor from electrically readable nanoscopic racetracks. Science 386, 315–322 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh3419

• Speaker: Prof Stuart Parkin (Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics)
• Friday 27 February 2026, 11:00-12:00
• Venue: Lecture Theatre, Level 2, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory, JJ Thomson Avenue, CB3 0US.
• Series: Scott Lectures; organiser: Vanessa Bismuth.

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Whilst the solar surface is a few thousand degrees, the solar corona (~2Mm further out than the surface) is roughly a million degrees. This has formed one of the greatest challenges in the solar physics, usually referred to as the coronal heating problem: how is the million-degree corona obtained and maintained against radiation. The last 70 years of solar research has focussed heavily on understanding heating mechanisms in an effort to solve the coronal heating problem. However, my research has shown that mechanisms often studied in the context of heating, such as shocks, may actually be cooling the solar plasma. Here I present results on radiative shocks and present analytical and numerical evidence of temperature-reducing shocks occurring under coronal conditions. The turbulent numerical simulation allows statistics of shocks to extracted, with roughly 40% of shocks having a net reduction in temperature. As such, the role of shocks in heating/cooling the solar atmosphere is an open question.

• Speaker: Ben Snow (Exeter)
• Monday 02 March 2026, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: MR14 DAMTP and online.
• Series: DAMTP Astrophysics Seminars; organiser: Roger Dufresne.

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Superconducting spintronics is a highly interesting area of research which allows, for example, for the formation of unconventional superconducting states via proximity induced superconductivity in certain magnetic materials.

We have shown that Josephson junctions fabricated from conventional s-wave superconductors that have barriers formed from an intrinsic noncollinear antiferromagnet1 or from magnetic multilayers designed to have magnetic layers with orthogonal magnetizations2 show very high supercurrent critical densities that are indicative of the formation of triplet supercurrents. Another highly interesting finding is the observation of a Josephson Diode effect (JDE)3-5 in both lateral and vertical Josephson junctions where the barrier is formed from a material that breaks both time reversal symmetry and inversion symmetry.

The simplest case is perhaps that of the pure metal platinum that is magnetized at one surface by proximity to an insulating ferromagnet in a direction perpendicular to the supercurrent that is created by niobium electrodes at the opposing surface6.

We find large asymmetries in the supercurrent critical density that increase with decreasing temperature below that of the superconducting ordering temperature of niobium. A more exotic case is where the barrier in lateral Josephson junctions is formed from a type II Dirac semi-metal, NiTe23. The superconducting critical current density shows large asymmetries for current flowing in opposite directions of up to 80% in the presence of small magnetic fields transverse to the supercurrent direction. The barriers can extend to almost a micron in extent and yet still allow for the passage of supercurrents. Similar results are found for barriers formed from PtTe24.

Vertical junctions formed from WTe2 also show a diode-like behavior in the presence of a magnetic field but only when the field is along a direction perpendicular to a mirror plane in the orthorhombic crystal structure of this unusual van der Waals material5. The JDE could form a novel device for reading magnetic nanoscopic objects at ultra low temperatures. Triplet supercurrents that carry spin angular momentum could potentially be used to manipulate magnetization.

Together these two superconducting spintronic effects are highly interesting for potential applications in cryogenic logic and memory that could support quantum computing systems. One of the most interesting applications is for a novel cryogenic form of racetrack memory7*.

References: 1: Jeon, K.-R. et al. Long-range supercurrents through a chiral non-collinear antiferromagnet in lateral Josephson junctions. Nat. Mater. 20, 1358–1363 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01061-9 2: Kindiak, I., Mishra, S. S., Migliorini, A., Pal, B. & Parkin, S. S. P. Reduced decay in Josephson coupling across ferromagnetic junctions with spin–orbit coupling layers. Appl. Phys. Lett. 125, 082601 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0214835 3: Pal, B. et al. Josephson diode effect from Cooper pair momentum in a topological semimetal. Nat. Phys. 18, 1228–1233 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01699-5 4: Sivakumar, P. K. et al. Long-range Phase Coherence and Second Order φ_0-Josephson Effect in a Dirac Semimetal 1T-PtTe2 Comm. Phys. 7, 354 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-024-01825-0 5: Kim, J.-K. et al. Intrinsic supercurrent non-reciprocity coupled to the crystal structure of a van der Waals Josephson barrier. Nat. Commun. 15, 1120 (2024). 6: Jeon, K.-R. et al. Zero-field polarity-reversible Josephson supercurrent diodes enabled by a proximity-magnetized Pt barrier. Nat. Mater. 21, 1008–1013 (2022). 7: Jeon, J.-C., Migliorini, A., Yoon, J., Jeong, J. & Parkin, S. S. P. Multi-core memristor from electrically readable nanoscopic racetracks. Science 386, 315–322 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh3419

• Speaker: Prof Stuart Parkin (Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics)
• Friday 27 February 2026, 11:00-12:00
• Venue: Lecture Theatre, Level 1, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory, JJ Thomson Avenue, CB3 0US.
• Series: Scott Lectures; organiser: Vanessa Bismuth.

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This decade is an exciting new era in studies of galaxy evolution, with dramatic advances driven by an array of novel observational capabilities from ground and space, culminating with the advent of the Extremely Large Telescope. This talk will focus on “cosmic noon”, the redshift z~1-3 epoch when the bulk of stars in present-day galaxies were formed. I will discuss key progress in our understanding of galaxy mass and structural growth, dynamics, gas, star formation, and feedback; highlight our changing picture of the precursor stages at z>3; and outline exciting prospects for the coming years.

• Speaker: Natascha M. Forster Schreiber
• Thursday 05 March 2026, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: Hoyle Lecture Theatre, Institute of Astronomy.
• Series: Institute of Astronomy Colloquia; organiser: Jan Scholtz.

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