ORC Professors part of £12m unprecedented research funding success

Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) Professors Peter Kazansky and Nikolay Zheludev are two of five researchers from the University of Southampton to have won prestigious and highly-competitive European research grants, totalling more than €12 million.

The funding awards mark the greatest success that the University has had in winning European Research Council’s (ERC) Advanced Grants.

The grants are to:

Professor Peter Kazansky, head of the Physical Optics group in the ORC, who has been awarded €2.5 million for his project entitled ENIGMA (ENgIneerinG MAterial properties with advanced laser direct writing). The project will examine the interaction between intense ultra-short light pulses and matter at, or below, the wavelength scale, reaching states of matter found only deep in the cores of the Earth and other planets.

Professor Kazansky said: “The ENIGMA project will push the frontiers of laser material processing to an unprecedented level of control and will develop a novel family of devices that will feed into the future of optics, electronics and computing.â€?

Professor Nikolay Zheludev, Deputy Director of the ORC and head of the Nanophotonics and Metamaterials research group, has been awarded €2.57 million for his FLEET (FLying ElectromagnEtic Toroids) project, which will study the generation, detection and interaction with matter of Flying Toroids, a type of light pulses never experimentally studied before.

Professor Zheludev said: “This project represents an exciting opportunity to advance optics and electromagnetism in a radically new direction since Hertz, Marconi, Popov and Tesla developed the ground-breaking technology for generating, detecting, and communicating with transverse electromagnetic waves.â€?

Also receiving ERC Advanced Grants from the University are Professor Lajos Hanzo, Electronics and Computer Science, for his QuantCom research project; Professor Malcolm Levitt, School of Chemistry, for his FunMagResBeacons (Functionalised Magnetic Resonance Beacons for Enhanced Spectroscopy and Imaging) project; and Professor Tony Brown, School of Geography and Environment, for a project entitled TerrACE, looking into the long-term creation, maintenance and use of ancient agricultural terraces.

Recognising the unprecedented success, University of Southampton President and Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Christopher Snowden said: “I am absolutely delighted and congratulate Nikolay, Lajos, Peter, Tony and Malcolm on their success with these prestigious awards. The ERC represents an important source of research funding and these successes reflect the very high quality of research at our University.â€?

Professor Sir David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre, added: “This is a fantastic achievement for our two ORC colleagues. These Advanced Grants are highly competitive and prestigious to win, and only awarded to exceptional leaders who show originality and significance in their research contributions. These are also grants without predetermined priorities, which means the research investigator has an unprecedented amount of freedom in terms of research direction.

“I congratulated Peter and Nikolay and look forward to even more research success stories emanating from the ORC.â€?