Five hubs launched to ensure UK benefits from quantum future
The hub, called Q-BIOMED, is one of five quantum research hubs announced today by Peter Kyle MP, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, supported by £160 million in funding.
The hub will exploit advances in quantum sensors capable of detecting cells and molecules, potentially orders of magnitude more sensitively than traditional diagnostic tests.
This includes developing quantum-enhanced blood tests to diagnose infectious diseases and cancer quickly and cheaply using portable instruments, and sensors measuring tiny changes to the magnetic fields in the brain that have the potential to detect early markers of Alzheimer’s disease before symptoms occur.
Other research will include quantum-enhanced MRI scans, heart scanners and surgical and treatment interventions for early-stage and hard-to-treat cancers.
“Quantum technologies harness quantum physics to achieve a functionality or a performance which is otherwise unattainable, deriving from science which cannot be explained by classical physics,” said Hub Co-Director Professor Mete Atatüre, Head of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. “Q-BIOMED will be delivered by an outstanding team of researchers from academia, the NHS, charities, government and industry to exploit quantum-enhanced advances for human health and societal good.”
“Our hub aims to grow a new quantum for health innovation ecosystem in the UK, and has already shaped the UK's new Quantum Mission for Health,” said Hub Co-Director Professor Rachel McKendry, from the London Centre for Nanotechnology and Division of Medicine at UCL. “Our long-term vision is to accelerate the entire innovation pipeline from discovery research, to translation, adoption and implementation within the NHS and global health systems, for the benefit of patients and societal good.”
“Quantum sensing allows us to gather information at cellular and molecular levels with unprecedented sensitivity to electric and magnetic fields," said Dr Ljiljana Fruk from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, a member of the Q-BIOMED team. "I look forward to learning from colleagues and engaging in challenging discussions to develop more sensitive, affordable tools for doctors and patients, advancing the future of healthcare.”
Cambridge researchers are also involved in three of the other newly-announced hubs:
- The UK Hub for Quantum Enabled Position, Navigation and Timing (QEPNT), led by the University of Glasgow, will develop quantum technologies which will be key for national security and critical infrastructure and sectors such as aerospace, connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), finance, maritime and agriculture. Luca Sapienza (Engineering), Louise Hirst (Materials Science and Metallurgy/Cavendish Laboratory) and Dave Ellis (Cavendish Laboratory) are part of the QEPNT team.
- QCI3: Hub for Quantum Computing via Integrated and Interconnected Implementations, led by the University of Oxford, aims to develop the technologies needed for the UK to play a key role in the development of quantum computers, a market estimated to be worth $1.3 trillion by 2030. Ulrich Schneider (Cavendish Laboratory), Helena Knowles (Cavendish Laboratory), and Chander Velu (Institute for Manufacturing) are part of the QCI3 team.
- The Integrated Quantum Networks (IQN) Quantum Technology Research Hub, led by Heriot-Watt University, will undertake research towards the ultimate goal of a ‘quantum internet’, globally interlinked quantum networks connecting multiple quantum computers to produce enormous computational power. Atatüre, Dorian Gangloff (Cavendish Laboratory) and Richard Penty (Engineering) are part of the IQN team.
The fifth hub, UK Quantum Technology Hub in Sensing, Imaging and Timing (QuSIT), is led by the University of Birmingham.
The five hubs are delivered by the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), with a £106 million investment from EPSRC, the UKRI Biotechnology and Biological Research Council, UKRI Medical Research Council, and the National Institute for Health and Care Research. Added to this are contributions from industry and other partners worth more than £54 million.
Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, said: “We want to see a future where cutting-edge science improves everyday lives. That is the vision behind our investment in these new quantum technology hubs, by supporting the deployment of technology that will mean faster diagnoses for diseases, critical infrastructure safe from hostile threats and cleaner energy for us all.
“This isn’t just about research; it’s about putting that research to work. These hubs will bridge the gap between brilliant ideas and practical solutions. They will not only transform sectors like healthcare and security, but also create a culture of accelerated innovation that helps to grow our economy.”
EPSRC Executive Chair Professor Charlotte Deane said: “Technologies harnessing quantum properties will provide unparalleled power and capacity for analysis at a molecular level, with truly revolutionary possibilities across everything from healthcare to infrastructure and computing.
“The five Quantum Technology Hubs announced today will harness the UK’s expertise to foster innovation, support growth and ensure that we capitalise on the profound opportunities of this transformative technology.”
A major new research hub led by the University of Cambridge and UCL aims to harness quantum technology to improve early diagnosis and treatment of disease.
James Tye/UCLL-R: Professor John Morton (UCL), Professor Rachel McKendry (UCL), Professor Mete Atatüre (Cambridge), Professor Eleni Nastouli (UCL)
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Earliest detection of metal challenges what we know about the first galaxies
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge observed a very young galaxy in the early universe and found that it contained surprising amounts of carbon, one of the seeds of life as we know it.
In astronomy, elements heavier than hydrogen or helium are classed as metals. The very early universe was almost entirely made up of hydrogen, the simplest of the elements, with small amounts of helium and tiny amounts of lithium.
Every other element that makes up the universe we observe today was formed inside a star. When stars explode as supernovas, the elements they produce are circulated throughout their host galaxy, seeding the next generation of stars. With every new generation of stars and ‘stardust’, more metals are formed, and after billions of years, the universe evolves to a point where it can support rocky planets like Earth and life like us.
The ability to trace the origin and evolution of metals will help us understand how we went from a universe made almost entirely of just two chemical elements, to the incredible complexity we see today.
“The very first stars are the holy grail of chemical evolution,” said lead author Dr Francesco D’Eugenio, from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge. “Since they are made only of primordial elements, they behave very differently to modern stars. By studying how and when the first metals formed inside stars, we can set a time frame for the earliest steps on the path that led to the formation of life.”
Carbon is a fundamental element in the evolution of the universe, since it can form into grains of dust that clump together, eventually forming into the first planetesimals and the earliest planets. Carbon is also key for the formation of life on Earth.
“Earlier research suggested that carbon started to form in large quantities relatively late – about one billion years after the Big Bang,” said co-author Professor Roberto Maiolino, also from the Kavli Institute. “But we’ve found that carbon formed much earlier – it might even be the oldest metal of all.”
The team used the JWST to observe a very distant galaxy – one of the most distant galaxies yet observed – just 350 million years after the Big Bang, more than 13 billion years ago. This galaxy is compact and low mass – about 100,000 times less massive than the Milky Way.
“It’s just an embryo of a galaxy when we observe it, but it could evolve into something quite big, about the size of the Milky Way,” said D’Eugenio. “But for such a young galaxy, it’s fairly massive.”
The researchers used Webb’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to break down the light coming from the young galaxy into a spectrum of colours. Different elements leave different chemical fingerprints in the galaxy’s spectrum, allowing the team to determine its chemical composition. Analysis of this spectrum showed a confident detection of carbon, and tentative detections of oxygen and neon, although further observations will be required to confirm the presence of these other elements.
“We were surprised to see carbon so early in the universe, since it was thought that the earliest stars produced much more oxygen than carbon,” said Maiolino. “We had thought that carbon was enriched much later, through entirely different processes, but the fact that it appears so early tells us that the very first stars may have operated very differently.”
According to some models, when the earliest stars exploded as supernovas, they may have released less energy than initially expected. In this case, carbon, which was in the stars’ outer shell and less gravitationally bound than oxygen, could have escaped more easily and spread throughout the galaxy, while a large amount of oxygen fell back and collapsed into a black hole.
“These observations tell us that carbon can be enriched quickly in the early universe,” said D’Eugenio. “And because carbon is fundamental to life as we know it, it’s not necessarily true that life must have evolved much later in the universe. Perhaps life emerged much earlier – although if there’s life elsewhere in the universe, it might have evolved very differently than it did here on Earth.”
The results have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and are based on data obtained within the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES).
The research was supported in part by the European Research Council, the Royal Society, and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
Reference:
Francesco D’Eugenio et al. ‘JADES: Carbon enrichment 350 Myr after the Big Bang.’ Astronomy & Astrophysics (in press). DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2311.09908
Astronomers have detected carbon in a galaxy just 350 million years after the Big Bang, the earliest detection of any element in the universe other than hydrogen.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA)Deep field image from JWST
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New instrument to search for signs of life on other planets
The ANDES instrument will be installed on ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in Chile’s Atacama Desert. It will be used to search for signs of life in exoplanets and look for the very first stars. It will also test variations of the fundamental constants of physics and measure the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion.
The University of Cambridge is a member institution on the project, which involves scientists from 13 countries. Professor Roberto Maiolino, from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, is ANDES Project Scientist.
Formerly known as HIRES, ANDES is a powerful spectrograph, an instrument which splits light into its component wavelengths so astronomers can determine properties about astronomical objects, such as their chemical compositions. The instrument will have a record-high wavelength precision in the visible and near-infrared regions of light and, when working in combination with the powerful mirror system of the ELT, it will pave the way for research spanning multiple areas of astronomy.
“ANDES is an instrument with an enormous potential for groundbreaking scientific discoveries, which can deeply affect our perception of the Universe far beyond the small community of scientists,” said Alessandro Marconi, ANDES Principal Investigator.
ANDES will conduct detailed surveys of the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets, allowing astronomers to search extensively for signs of life. It will also be able to analyse chemical elements in faraway objects in the early Universe, making it likely to be the first instrument capable of detecting signatures of Population III stars, the earliest stars born in the Universe.
In addition, astronomers will be able to use ANDES’ data to test if the fundamental constants of physics vary with time and space. Its comprehensive data will also be used to directly measure the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion, one of the most pressing mysteries about the cosmos.
When operations start later this decade, the ELT will be the world’s biggest eye on the sky, marking a new age in ground-based astronomy.
Adapted from an ESO press release.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has signed an agreement for the design and construction of ANDES, the ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph.
ESOArtist's impression of the ANDES instrument
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Webb detects most distant black hole merger to date
Astronomers have found supermassive black holes with masses of millions to billions times that of the Sun in most massive galaxies in the local Universe, including in our Milky Way galaxy. These black holes have likely had a major impact on the evolution of the galaxies they reside in. However, scientists still don’t fully understand how these objects grew to become so massive.
The finding of gargantuan black holes already in place in the first billion years after the Big Bang indicates that such growth must have happened very rapidly, and very early. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope is shedding new light on the growth of black holes in the early Universe.
The new Webb observations have provided evidence for an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the Universe was just 740 million years old. The system is known as ZS7.
Massive black holes that are actively accreting matter have distinctive spectrographic features that allow astronomers to identify them. For very distant galaxies, like those in this study, these signatures are inaccessible from the ground and can only be seen with Webb.
“We found evidence for very dense gas with fast motions in the vicinity of the black hole, as well as hot and highly ionised gas illuminated by the energetic radiation typically produced by black holes in their accretion episodes,” said lead author Dr Hannah Übler of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and Kavli Institute for Cosmology. “Thanks to the unprecedented sharpness of its imaging capabilities, Webb also allowed our team to spatially separate the two black holes.”
The team found that one of the two black holes has a mass that is 50 million times the mass of the Sun. “The mass of the other black hole is likely similar, although it is much harder to measure because this second black hole is buried in dense gas,” said team member Professor Roberto Maiolino, also from the Kavli Institute.
“Our findings suggest that merging is an important route through which black holes can rapidly grow, even at cosmic dawn,” said Übler. “Together with other Webb findings of active, massive black holes in the distant Universe, our results also show that massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the very beginning.”
The team notes that once the two black holes merge, they will also generate gravitational waves. Events like this will be detectable with the next generation of gravitational wave observatories, such as the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, which was recently approved by the European Space Agency and will be the first space-based observatory dedicated to studying gravitational waves.
This discovery was from observations made as part of the Galaxy Assembly with NIRSpec Integral Field Spectroscopy programme. The team has recently been awarded a new Large Programme in Webb’s Cycle 3 of observations, to study in detail the relationship between massive black holes and their host galaxies in the first billion years. An important component of this programme will be to systematically search for and characterise black hole mergers. This effort will determine the rate at which black hole merging occurs at early cosmic epochs and will assess the role of merging in the early growth of black holes and the rate at which gravitational waves are produced from the dawn of time.
These results have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Reference:
Hannah Übler et al. ‘GA-NIFS: JWST discovers an offset AGN 740 million years after the big bang’ Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2024). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stae943
Adapted from a press release by the European Space Agency.
An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, has used the James Webb Space Telescope to find evidence for an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the Universe was only 740 million years old. This marks the most distant detection of a black hole merger ever obtained and the first time that this phenomenon has been detected so early in the Universe.
Massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the very beginningHannah ÜblerESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, J. Dunlop, H. Übler, R. Maiolino, et. alThe environment of the galaxy system ZS7 from the JWST PRIMER programme as seen by Webb's NIRCam instrument
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A simple ‘twist’ improves the engine of clean fuel generation
The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, are developing low-cost light-harvesting semiconductors that power devices for converting water into clean hydrogen fuel, using just the power of the sun. These semiconducting materials, known as copper oxides, are cheap, abundant and non-toxic, but their performance does not come close to silicon, which dominates the semiconductor market.
However, the researchers found that by growing the copper oxide crystals in a specific orientation so that electric charges move through the crystals at a diagonal, the charges move much faster and further, greatly improving performance. Tests of a copper oxide light harvester, or photocathode, based on this fabrication technique showed a 70% improvement over existing state-of-the-art oxide photocathodes, while also showing greatly improved stability.
The researchers say their results, reported in the journal Nature, show how low-cost materials could be fine-tuned to power the transition away from fossil fuels and toward clean, sustainable fuels that can be stored and used with existing energy infrastructure.
Copper (I) oxide, or cuprous oxide, has been touted as a cheap potential replacement for silicon for years, since it is reasonably effective at capturing sunlight and converting it into electric charge. However, much of that charge tends to get lost, limiting the material’s performance.
“Like other oxide semiconductors, cuprous oxide has its intrinsic challenges,” said co-first author Dr Linfeng Pan from Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. “One of those challenges is the mismatch between how deep light is absorbed and how far the charges travel within the material, so most of the oxide below the top layer of material is essentially dead space.”
“For most solar cell materials, it’s defects on the surface of the material that cause a reduction in performance, but with these oxide materials, it’s the other way round: the surface is largely fine, but something about the bulk leads to losses,” said Professor Sam Stranks, who led the research. “This means the way the crystals are grown is vital to their performance.”
To develop cuprous oxides to the point where they can be a credible contender to established photovoltaic materials, they need to be optimised so they can efficiently generate and move electric charges – made of an electron and a positively-charged electron ‘hole’ – when sunlight hits them.
One potential optimisation approach is single-crystal thin films – very thin slices of material with a highly-ordered crystal structure, which are often used in electronics. However, making these films is normally a complex and time-consuming process.
Using thin film deposition techniques, the researchers were able to grow high-quality cuprous oxide films at ambient pressure and room temperature. By precisely controlling growth and flow rates in the chamber, they were able to ‘shift’ the crystals into a particular orientation. Then, using high temporal resolution spectroscopic techniques, they were able to observe how the orientation of the crystals affected how efficiently electric charges moved through the material.
“These crystals are basically cubes, and we found that when the electrons move through the cube at a body diagonal, rather than along the face or edge of the cube, they move an order of magnitude further,” said Pan. “The further the electrons move, the better the performance.”
“Something about that diagonal direction in these materials is magic,” said Stranks. “We need to carry out further work to fully understand why and optimise it further, but it has so far resulted in a huge jump in performance.” Tests of a cuprous oxide photocathode made using this technique showed an increase in performance of more than 70% over existing state-of-the-art electrodeposited oxide photocathodes.
“In addition to the improved performance, we found that the orientation makes the films much more stable, but factors beyond the bulk properties may be at play,” said Pan.
The researchers say that much more research and development is still needed, but this and related families of materials could have a vital role in the energy transition.
“There’s still a long way to go, but we’re on an exciting trajectory,” said Stranks. “There’s a lot of interesting science to come from these materials, and it’s interesting for me to connect the physics of these materials with their growth, how they form, and ultimately how they perform.”
The research was a collaboration with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Nankai University and Uppsala University. The research was supported in part by the European Research Council, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Sam Stranks is Professor of Optoelectronics in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.
Reference:
Linfeng Pan, Linjie Dai et al. ‘High carrier mobility along the [111] orientation in Cu2O photoelectrodes.’ Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07273-8
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Researchers have found a way to super-charge the ‘engine’ of sustainable fuel generation – by giving the materials a little twist.
orange via Getty ImagesAbstract orange swirls
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