Teaching
Ifan G Hughes

I lecture a fourth-year course Atoms, Photons and Qubits; I give the Error Lectures for the 1st year Discovery Skills Module; I co-ordinate the Level 2 Laboratory Skills and I am Chair of the Laboratories Comittee. For a decade I taught a third-year course Modern Optics.

In 2003 I was awarded a University of Durham Excellence in Teaching award.

This year I am involved in the supervision of four fourth-year project students; the topics are:

A stabilised interferometer for atomic physics experiments

Combined electric-magnetic traps for quantum information processing

A compact spectrometer for laser cooling experiments

Laser spectroscopy of potassium.

From 2004-08 I developed a new laboratory teaching module and was the director of the first-year laboratory. Details of the Discovery Skills in Physics Module can be found at this independent-learning resource.

With my colleague Tom Hase I published a book about measurement uncertainties and error analysis; further details are available from the Oxford University Press site.

The Institute of Physics diary cover for 2007-08 is an image from a paper published by Dr Ifan Hughes' research group.

The paper from which the figure is taken develops the idea of transporting ultracold atoms with a laser guide and pulsed magnetic fields. Two of the authors (Hallwood, Pleasant) were undergraduate MSci students, who studied this problem during their fourth year projects. The first author (Pritchard), who was a PhD student when the work was completed, had developed the magnetic lens during his MSci project. The work was done in collaboration with Aidan Arnold, from Strathclyde University.