SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS

PL: Luiz A.C. A. Schiavo, PCL: James A. McLaughlin, Gert J.J. Botha, and Natasha L.S. Jeffrey Solar flares are among the most powerful events in the solar system, releasing vast amounts of magnetic energy stored in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the solar corona. This energy release is driven by a fundamental process called magnetic reconnection, […]

PI: Christine Davies Axion-like particles (ALPs) frequently appear as light spinless particles in extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. How best to find them, if they exist, depends on their mass and the strength of their coupling to known particles. Figure 1. Diagrams showing how a vector meson, V (here the J/𝛙), decays […]

PI: Christopher Thomas The LHCb experiment at CERN has discovered an unprecedented number of new hadrons (bound states of quarks and gluons), around 70 to date. Many of these are seen as short-lived resonances decaying through the strong interaction to lighter, stable hadrons. Numerous of them lie at unexpected energies compared to what is predicted […]

PI: Thaddeus Komacek Highlight 1: General Circulation Model (GCM) simulations of the first planet orbiting close-in to a pulsar characterised with the James Webb Space Telescope. Figure 1 (top): Temperature maps and streamlines (left) and temperature-pressure profiles (right) from 3D GCMs of PSR J2322-2650b. From Zhang et al. (2025), ApJL, 995:L64. Highlight 2: GCM simulations […]

PI: Matteini Alfvén waves play a crucial role in the transport of energy in various magnetised laboratory, space and astrophysical plasmas. They are both linear and non-linear MHD solutions and can travel long distances along the background magnetic field, transporting and depositing energy far from the source. In the presence of compressible fluctuations however, Alfvén […]

PI: David Schaich DiRAC Project dp162/APP50526, “Lattice studies of maximally supersymmetric Yang–Mills in three dimensions”, is exploring conjectured holographic dualities that relate supersymmetric quantum field theories to quantum gravity in a higher number of space-time dimensions. Such holographic dualities are widely employed in theoretical physics, and are beginning to benefit from first-principles lattice field theory […]

PI: Peter Wyper Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Sun are massive expulsions of plasma and magnetic field originating in the Sun’s atmosphere (the solar corona). They are the main driver of Space Weather around the Earth, and come in a variety of different morphologies. In a new study involving simulation data developed with Dirac […]

PI: Ricarda Beckmann Almost every massive galaxy in the local Universe contains a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its centre. These present-day SMBHs evolved from smaller seed black holes (BHs) through processes such as gas accretion and mergers between black holes. Understanding the origins of these SMBHs and validating the role of black hole feedback, […]

PI: Sergey Yurchenko Our 2025 programme delivered a coordinated set of spectroscopic and photochemical data products that directly enable robust interpretation of exoplanet and planetary atmospheres, especially for retrieval frameworks and for high-resolution cross-correlation spectroscopy (HRCCS). The work is united by a single technical requirement: extremely large, high-accuracy molecular datasets (line lists, empirical energies, pressure […]

PI: Ken Rice The goal of this project was to understand the evolution of solids in gravitationally unstable protostellar discs. It’s becoming increasingly clear that planet formation starts during the earliest stages of star formation when these discs are also susceptible to the gravitational instability. Therefore, it seems likely that this phase may play a […]