Category: News and Events

Past and present members of FaRMS presented at the Uranium Science 2023 conference recently. This year the event ran from 5th – 7th July 2023 at the Henry Royce Institute, University of Manchester, UK. Past members E. Lawrence Bright, D. Chaney and J. Lewis all gave oral presentations, as well as current FaRMS team members F. Legg and C. Bell. Work by L. Harding was also presented as a poster.

Team members at the conference dinner at the Manchester Museum. From left to right: Florence Legg, Phil Hutchinson, Chris Bell, Dan Chaney, Ross Springell, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Jarrod Lewis, Lottie Harding and Eleanor Lawrence Bright.

The week beginning the 8^th May saw the installation of FaRMS’s new Rigaku Smart Lab SE diffractometer in the School of Physics. For experts: the two-dimensional detector on this system will be especially powerful for off-specular measurements on thin film samples, allowing us to more efficiently probe the in-plane lattice parameters in our thin film samples.

The new x-ray system in the School of Physics.

Team members Dr Lottie Harding and PhD student Florence Legg were recently at the ID11 beamline at ESRF, Grenoble, France, conducting some high temperature oxidation studies on Florence’s mixed-actinide oxide epitaxial thin films.

Dr Lottie Harding (left) and Florence Legg (right) with Beam Line Scientist (and Bristol alumna) Dr Eleanor Lawrence Bright at the ID11 end station.

Several members of the FaRMS team attended the 52^nd Journées des Actinides (JdA) conference at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, Germany. Congratulations to PhD student Florence Legg on winning the Best Poster Prize, for her work entitled “Epitaxial light actinide oxide thin films”.

Florence Legg next to her prize-winning poster.

Members of the FaRMS team are authors of newly published study entitled “Epitaxial stabilisation of uranium silicide line compounds”, in the journal Thin Solid Films. A link to the paper is here. First author, Lottie Harding, carried out this work during her PhD, supervised by Ross Springell. Lottie is now a Researcher Associate working on a range of actinide thin films. All of the samples grown in this study were fabricated using the FaRMS sputtering system. Congratulations Lottie!