Former PhD student HFML awarded EPSRC Fellowship

Experimental physicist Jake Ayres, a former PhD student at HFML, has been awarded a two-year fully funded EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship to determine whether the elusive origin of high temperature superconductivity can come from a newly revealed incoherent variety of electrons.

“Using the high fields at the HFML during my PhD, I found signs that there appear to be two ‘varieties’ of electrons in high temperature superconductors. One type behaves as we would expect ‘normal’ electrons to behave in magnetic fields, but the other variety is very unusual and appears to be incoherent. It’s potentially very exciting because understanding high temperature superconductivity is a 30 year old problem and one that numerous Nobel prize winners have contributed towards. Incoherent transport and how it might be linked to high temperature superconductivity is new line of thinking. I hope the planned thermodynamic measurements will tell us something new and fundamental about the problem.”

Ayres is now working as a postdoc in the group of Nigel Hussey at the University of Bristol, but he will be visiting Nijmegen frequently (when possible) to use thermodynamic measurements developed for high field measurements at the HFML.

EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship
The EPSRC fellowship supports recent PhD graduates’ transition into early career research. It is for or recently graduated or final-stage outstanding PhD researchers who have been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for their research. They can launch their research career in a supportive environment. Doctoral Prize Fellows propose their own bespoke programme to conduct innovative, ground-breaking research at the frontiers of the fields of Engineering, Life Sciences and Science.