Atomic and Laser Physics

UROP Vacation Projects in Atomic & Laser Physics

We are offering several undergraduate research projects within Atomic & Laser Physics. Students selected for these projects will be paid the Oxford Living Wage (from April 2025: £13.16 per hour), subject to tax and National Insurance deductions. The duration and weekly hours of projects may vary. 

Eligibility

These projects are open to:

• Current undergraduate students
• Students in taught Master’s programs

Preference may be given to candidates not starting a Ph.D. program in 2025.

We welcome applications from students at universities outside Oxford.

📌 Work eligibility requirement:

• Applicants must not require a visa to work in the UK.
• Tier 4 visa holders in the UK may apply if their visa permits vacation employment.

How to apply

1. Submit a 2-page application (as one PDF file) via email to Gail Jackson (alpadmin@physics.ox.ac.uk) with "UROP" in the subject line.
    
2. Your PDF file must be named:
   📂 LAST NAME_First Name_ALP UROP_Name of Project Applied for
    
3. Your application must include:
   1️⃣ One-page statement (≤500 words)
   1. Why do you want to do the project?
   2. Your previous experience.
   3. Research topics or projects of interest.
       
4. 2️⃣ One-page CV
    
5. 📌 Reference Requirement:
   1. You must provide the contact details (including email) of an academic referee.
   2. Your referee must submit a short letter of support separately via email to Gail Jackson (alpadmin@physics.ox.ac.uk) .

Applying for Multiple Projects?

1. If you are applying for more than one project, you must submit separate applications.
   📂 Rename your email subject and PDF file accordingly for each project.
    

Project Title: Equation of State for Structured Foam Targets

Supervisor: Prof. Peter A. Norreys
Duration: 8 weeks FT
Dates of Internship: 11th August - 26th September 2025
Closing date for applications: Sunday 27th April

Foams are of significant interest for inertial fusion for a variety of applications. One key example are ‘wetted-foam’ capsules, where the DT ice layer present in conventional capsules is replaced with low-density foam saturated with liquid DT. Alongside potential performance benefits, such foam capsules could potentially be 3D printed – enabling low-cost mass-manufacturing of fusion targets. However, foams are inhomogeneous materials, and this makes modelling them a challenge. The equation of state of foams is not well characterised, and it is common to simulate them simply as low-density homogenous materials. This assumption can introduce uncertainties. In addition to this, it is not known how the more regular structure of 3D printed foams may cause changes to this behaviour. In a scheduled experiment on the LULI2000 laser facility, we will aim to investigate the influence of 3D printed structures on the foam equation of state. Following on from our previous successful experiment at the UK CLF’s Vulcan laser facility to measure the equation of state of TMPTA foam, we will aim to use similar methods (VISAR and SOP) to measure equation of state behaviour of another conventional foam at similar density. We will then aim to use the same platform and methodology to measure equation of state behaviour for 3D printed foams of the same material, with a variety of different structures, in order to investigate the impact that this internal structure has on the compression behaviour. The student will likely travel with the group to Ecole Polytechnique to assist with the experiment in September 2025.

Project title: Kinetic Modelling of Burning Plasmas for Inertial Fusion Energy

Supervisor: Prof. Peter A. Norreys
Duration: 8 weeks FT
Dates of Internship: 4th August - 26th September
Closing date for applications: Monday 5th May
 

The Vlasov-Fokker-Planck (VFP) equation describes the evolution of a collisional plasma, and can be applied to an igniting ICF plasma to provide a detailed description of each particle species. Our group is developing a numerical VFP code to study various phenomena relevant to igniting plasmas, simulating the extreme conditions involved as a plasma begins to self-heat via thermonuclear fusion. The successful candidate will work with a PhD student to develop additional physics modules for the code, and aid in carrying out a simulation campaign to investigate various kinetic effects neglected by other computational models.
 

Project Title: Towards site-resolved readout of ions using multimode fibre for scalable trapped ion quantum computing

Supervisors: Dr Joe Goodwin and Dr Gabriel Araneda Machuca
Duration: 8 weeks, FT
Start date: 25th July 2025
Closing date for applications: Sunday 4th May

Details: A leading challenge in trapped ion quantum computing is the readout of the states of individual ions within strings of ions held in closely separated trapping zones. One solution may be to utilise the quasi-random transmission matrices of multimode fibres guiding fluorescent light from the ions in each trapping zone to a CCD camera. By characterising the imaged speckle patterns for a controlled object field, we aim to develop an algorithm that can determine which ions are bright and which are dark. In this project, you will demonstrate a proof-of-principle experiment, imaging dots produced by a digital micromirror device onto a multimode fibre to determine whether high fidelity individual ion readout is feasible in our planned modular quantum network demonstrator nodes.

Project Highlight: Optical Neural Networks
Supervisor: Prof. Alex Lvovsky
Duration: 12 weeks (part-time: 50%)
Available positions: 2
Closing date: Wednesday 19th March

Optical neural networks (ONNs) harness the fundamental properties of light to enable ultrafast, energy-efficient computation, surpassing the limitations of digital-electronic systems in tasks such as large-scale matrix multiplications. By exploiting interference, diffraction, and nonlinearity, ONNs can perform parallel processing of high-dimensional data, reducing latency and power consumption. The project involves exploring three complementary perspectives on ONNs. (1) The first one deals with ONN applications for machine intelligence and computer vision. (2) The second aspect has to do with ONNs applied for spatial mode decomposition of an optical field, enabling the extraction of spatial information beyond the classical diffraction limit by leveraging the quantum and classical correlations in the field. (3) Finally, we study coherent optical spin machines, in which an optical network with feedback finds minimum-energy gates of interacting spin systems to solve nontrivial combinatorial optimization problems. The successful applicant will have an opportunity to engage with any of these aspects of our research. 

Applications from students who have been engaged in the group’s research during the academic year are given priority.

Project Title: Electrodynamic trapping of charged particles in air
Supervisor: Prof. Chris Foot
Duration: 4 weeks (full-time) 30hrs pw
Closing date: Wednesday 19th March

An existing apparatus will be used to measure the properties of volcanic ash particles such as how the viscous damping of motion in air depends on their shape and orientation. This is an extension of the electrodynamic trapping experiment on the practical course and knowledge of that apparatus would be an advantage, as well as experience of electronics and optics.

Applications from students who have been engaged in the group’s research during the academic year are given priority.

Project Title: Ion Trap Quantum Computing
Supervisor: Dr. Chris Ballance
Duration: 12 weeks FT
Available positions: 1
Closing date: Monday 31st March

One of the main challenges in building quantum computers is scaling up to larger systems. Our group (Advanced Barium Quantum System, or ABaQuS) is researching scaling methods for ion trap quantum computers. A common solution is to work with longer chains of ions. This approach requires individual addressing of the ions – the ability to shine lasers (and thus drive coherent operations) on select ions and not others. 

The summer project would focus on developing a new addressing system or gate scheme to improve gate fidelities and reduce environmental noise in the system. The project can be made more theoretical or more practical, depending on the student’s preference.