Heading East

I’m excited to be travelling to China. I’m on my way to Hangzhou, which is a couple hours away from Shanghai. This will be a relatively short trip, and a good opportunity to revive the blog with news and pictures of where my research and outreach activities take me! Thanks for tuning in, expect 2-3 posts a week over the next fortnight.

Next week I will be presenting a paper at the 14th International Conference on Education and Training on Optics and Photonics (ETOP) on organising science classes in places where you wouldn’t expect them. This is based around a couple of events, one that I run at the 2016 Winchester Cathedral Primary Science Festival, and another show on particle physics that co-author Alex Jantzen did at Salisbury Cathedral. You’ll read (and see) more about that in due course!

I will also be visiting Zhejiang University to meet with potential collaborators on research projects. I posted a while back on the research I am doing to build photonics integrated circuits to make polarisation filters. An application of these filters is to enhance optical integrated gyroscopes, a type of sensor that can be used for navigation in aerospace or satellites for instance. The polarisation of light in these circuits can cause unwanted sources of noise that are detrimental to the signal they are trying to sense. The technology I’ve been developing could offer a significant improvement of the “signal-to-noise” ratio in these devices. I am looking forward for the opportunity to present my research and find out about work happening in Zhejiang.

I was very near Guangzhou in 2008, but I never visited. Back then I spent time in Shanghai, studying Mandarin Chinese at Fudan University. The memories are great, alas the language skills not so good anymore! I have found that Chinese is an unforgiving language, which will slip away without regular practice! I imagine that in the past 9 years Shanghai has changed a lot, and I’m looking forward to catch up with people and see how things have changed!

This trip will not have been possible without the support of a few organisations, and I am grateful for receiving travel grants from the IOP Physics Communicators Group, Zhejiang University, the University of Southampton EPSRC-funded Future Photonics Manufacturing Hub and Impact Acceleration Account.