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Welcome to our group website

We have been known as the Polymer Physics group for a long time ~ 20 years. However given the breadth and diversity in our research we have decided to rebadge ourselves. We still love polymer physics and think that it has substantial overlap and huge importance to the many materials / biological physics problems that we are interested in.

An outing involving some of the group to the Peak District. (l-r) Dr Tom Sexton, Dr Tom Catley, Dr Rachel Kilbride, Dr Stephanie Burg, Dr Andrew Parnell, Prof. Richard Jones (UoM), Mr Paul Evans (honorary member), Miss Emilia Hudzik, Mr Will Fraser. Image courtesy of Will and his cool camera.

These include;

Organic photovoltaics, polymer surface/interface physics, antibacterial/biocidal surfaces, block copolymers, self-assembly, polymer nanocomposites, thin films (diffusion/dynamics), biophotonics/structural colour and tomography

We love to use neutron and X-ray scattering techniques (amongst many other techniques) as these give us the ability to look at many of our systems under ambient conditions and give us the level of structural information we need. We have worked and continue to work with many great scientists at the Rutherford Labs (UK), the ILL (Institute Laue Langevin) and the ESRF in Grenoble and also further afield.

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September 2024 – IOP Polymer Physics in Edinburgh

We have recently returned from an all too brief trip to the Institute of Physics – Physical Aspects of Polymer Science meeting. On the left is Joe Orgill, myself in the middle (Dr Andy Parnell) and Francis Gurman on the right. We all three of us had talks and it was truly a fantastic meeting both scientifically and socially. Thanks so much to the organising committee for making it such a success !

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April 2023 – Antibacterial Surfaces paper out

Our work on antibacterial surfaces is starting to appear. The first output is a comprehensive review of the “known knowns” or so we thought. Anyway it highlights the fact that there is still plenty of work to be done to truly undertand how to produce surfaces that mechanically kill bacteria in a rationally optimised way.

This has been a fantastic collaborative piece of science with my colleague Dr Rebecca Corrigan and our joint student now Dr Tom Catley.

Link to the paper

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September 2022 – Perovskite scattering paper

Our recent paper has just been published in the ACS journal Chemistry of Materials. This work was a collaboration between Sheffield and TU Delft (with another Dr Parnell). The work was initiated by my colleague Mary O’Kane, a CDT PhD student in the Physics Department at Sheffield. It has been really very rewarding working with Mary and hopefully we have helped to dispel some of the dogma that exists at to what happens in solution prior to film formation.

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April 2022 – Diamond experiment

It’s been a while but this was one of our first in person experiments back at the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire. Really exciting to be working back at a synchrotron.

Thanks so much to Frane Babarovic for his boundless enthusiasm and his old school analogue camera (Canon AE1 and 50mm lens) for the photos he took of the experiment.

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October 2021 Off the Shelf – Art meets Science – available to watch from the 28th October 2021.

You can see Dr Andy Parnell and Paul Evans discussing their long term Science-Art collaboration and talking through the visuals that they have co-created alongside working with Human studio. This forms part of the hugely influential Off the Shelf literary festival

https://player.sheffield.ac.uk/events/sciart-very-big-and-very-small

The Delft service, combining scattering patterns that are due to nanostructure with beauty that is Delft pottery. This stems from our links working the Reactor Institute Delft, who run a programme to study materials using neutrons.
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May 2021 PRL imaging paper

A paper on bringing ptyochography to the masses has just been published. This work involved Myself and Dr Sasha Mykhaylyk from Sheffield alongside a team from Diamond Light Source and some talented young scientists from the University of Ghent. The team from Diamond was Dr Darren Batey and Dr Silvia Cipicia (now at UCL).

The paper can be found here. The work was featured as a highlight in PRL and also on the Diamond Light Source website

Image showing the X-ray ptychography setup used in Sheffield to demonstrate how this could be achieved using non-synchrotron sources.