Congratulations to the two Otago Energy students for their success in this year’s Energy Education Trust Undergraduate Scholarship round!
The EETNZ Scholarships are available to students in year three or four pursuing a full-time bachelor’s degree in science, economics or engineering and related fields but with an interest in energy as it relates to the specific needs of Aotearoa New Zealand. More information can be found at www.eetnz.org.nz.
Each winter the ocean in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica freezes to form sea ice. I will present results from my PhD studying the effect of atmosphere and ocean on the thickness of landfast sea-ice. Measurements were taken between 1986–2022 which provided a baseline against which I examined the variation in landfast sea-ice thickness between years. I will highlight the atmosphere and ocean properties most likely to influence landfast sea-ice thickness in McMurdo Sound. There is no main driver of fast-ice thickness in McMurdo Sound, but I found that in years when the air is colder, (southerly) wind speed is higher, and there are less southerly storms, the landfast sea ice is thicker. There remains a need for a future event-based analysis, especially around extreme storm events driving winter landfast sea- ice break up and persistence. The talk will give a general overview of Antarctic sea ice and McMurdo Sound in particular, as well as fieldwork undertaken during my PhD.
Otago BAppSc(Energy) graduate Yoyo Wu working on hydrogen trucking at HW Richardson talks about their first hydrogen conversion!
Fusion energy is a hot topic at the moment and does not need any introduction. Useful fusion energy has been 30 years away for the past 80 years, and although recent achievements have been advertised as “breakthroughs”, the reality is that there are still a lot of technical challenges to overcome with the current fusion devices before we are likely to see them providing electricity to the grid.
Inspired by the dipole plasma observed around Jupiter, a joint MIT-Columbia experiment was born in the early 2000’s to test a concept known as the levitated dipole reactor (LDR). The LDR boasts a wide range of plasma performance improvements over the conventional approaches to fusion and represents the first commercially relevant fusion concept that can be achieved with current technology.
OpenStar Technologies is a Wellington-based start-up developing a levitated dipole fusion reactor. In this seminar we will introduce the physics of LDRs and why a fusion company has started in New Zealand, of all places.
Sea Ice has been diminishing at an alarming rate, but what is the science? Associate Professor Inga Smith and NIWA’s Dr Natalie Robinson discuss sea ice Physics on Radio NZ, The Detail NZ podcast: “Why is Antarctic sea ice vanishing?”.
The Beverly clock was featured on Seven Sharp – The clock that doesn’t stop!
The Beverly clock on the 3rd floor of the Physics Department is powered by atmospheric pressure changes and has run continuously despite not being manually wound since its construction by Arthur Beverly in 1864. As one of the longest running experiments in the world, it predates even the founding of the University of Otago in 1869.
A University of Otago PhD candidate has been chosen as the only person from Aotearoa NZ to receive a $10,000 Australian scholarship and 50,000 hours of computing time, which she will put towards her research in ozone hole depletion.
Dipolar interactions are fundamentally different from the usual van der Waals forces in real gases. Besides its anisotropy, the dipolar interaction is nonlocal and as such allows for self organized structure formation, like in many different fields of physics. Although the bosonic dipolar quantum liquid is very dilute, stable droplets and supersolids as well as honeycomb or labyrinth patterns can be formed due to the presence of quantum fluctuations beyond mean field theory.
Niels works in experimental atomic and laser physics. At Otago his research group has constructed an optical tweezers platform, where powerful laser beams can pinch and manipulate clouds of atoms at temperatures less than one millionth of a degree above absolute zero.
In the Marsden-funded project ‘Littlest Hadron Collider: a Laser-based Accelerator for Ultra-cold Atoms’, they used their optical tweezers for gently bumping frigid atomic clouds together to explore the nature of interactions between atoms colliding at pedestrian speeds. The experiments captured paradigms of quantum mechanics by literally photographing scattered atoms and the project ‘Reactive Cold Collisions in Steerable Optical Tweezers’, recently funded by Marsden, aims to extend their method to the realm of ultracold chemistry.
Niels’ interests also include the two-way, entangled interplay that happens when light and matter meet to interchange information and polarisations become twisted, rays get bent, and atoms are pushed around by light. The observation of Pauli blocking of light scattering published in Science Magazine was selected as Top-10 breakthrough of 2021 by Physics World.
This lecture will be followed with light refreshments, tea, coffee and juice.
This event will be live-streamed, from 5:25pm Thursday, 9 March 2023, at the following web address:
Professor David Hutchinson, Director of the Dodd-Walls Centre Te Whai Ao, was last week awarded the prestigious Thomson Medal by the Royal Society Te Apārangi.
Professor Hutchinson received the Thomson Medal for his excellence in leading the successful bid and subsequent development of the Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies (DWC), and for his valuable contributions to early career researchers and community outreach programmes.