Past event
Making Waves Lecture Series: Professor Peter Wahl Laying the foundations of future technologies, one atom at a time
Venue: Royal Over-Seas League, 6 Park Place, St James's, London, SW1A 1LR
As part of the Making Waves Lecture Series, the Development team invites you to the next event with Professor Peter Wahl from the School of Physics and Astronomy.
Professor Wahl's research aims to develop bespoke tools that enable observation, at the atomic level, of electrons within solid materials, allowing for identification of new materials for future information technologies.
The success of today's information technology is a result of in-depth materials research. It involves manipulating materials at incredibly tiny scales, just a few billionths of a metre, and controlling how they conduct electricity. This miniaturisation has allowed us to create powerful integrated circuits with billions of transistors, which, in turn, drive numerous applications, from simulating the world around us to building artificial intelligence. However, the ever-increasing demands on technology are starting to pose challenges. Not only are we running into limits on how small we can make things, but the amount of energy our technology consumes is becoming a problem, both in terms of technical constraints and environmental impact.
New materials provide a route to tackle these issues. Current technology primarily uses the charge of electrons to convey information, but another property, ‘spin', has been identified as a potential method of transmitting information. Controlling spin could allow for transmission of information without generating excess heat and enable its use for quantum computing. However, to harness the full potential of these materials and address the current technology's challenges, we need to delve into their microscopic details.
Join us at the Royal Overseas League to hear Professor Peter Wahl share insights we can gain from these atomic-scale images, shedding light on the properties of materials that continue to defy our current understanding.