Two Australian students have been recognised with awards from the AIP for achieving outstanding results in their university research theses.

Martha Reece from the Australian National University receives the 2023 TH Laby Medal for her Honours thesis: ‘Challenging nuclear vibrations with particle-gamma spectroscopy’.

Martha’s honours research advances our technical capability to study collective features of atomic nuclei through Coulomb excitation. Using this method, she demonstrated that the collective behaviour of tellurium-124 does not conform with expectations derived from the nuclear shell model.

Dr Kirill Koshelev from the Australian National University receives the 2023 Bragg Gold Medal for his PhD thesis: ‘Advanced trapping of light in resonant dielectric metastructures for nonlinear optics’.

Kirill’s PhD research develops pioneering concepts of resonant metaphotonics and metasurfaces, opening the door to new nanodevices capable of computational signal processing using light.

The compact nanodevices developed through Kirill's work pave the way towards photonics, which is smaller and faster technology that uses laser light instead of electronics.  

To achieve efficient data processing in photonics, light must be trapped in a small space and held there for a long period of time. Until now, physicists had only achieved this with objects larger than the wavelength of light.

Kirill's work also has wide-ranging potential application in medicine, surgery and industry; including improved hair removal devices, laser printers, and night-time surveillance technology.

Both the TH Laby Medal and Bragg Gold Medal will be presented at the ANZCOP-AIP Summer Meeting in Canberra in December.