Hello, and welcome to the Physics World weekly
podcast.
Our guest in this episode is Paul Meredith.
He's professor of materials
science and director
of the Centre for Integrative
Semiconductor
Materials
at The UK's
Swansea University.
In a wide ranging conversation
with Physics World's Matin Durrani,
Meredith talks about the importance of semiconductors
to a successful
high-tech economy.
And he also talks about the role that
his center plays in supporting a manufacturing
ecosystem
that provides highly skilled jobs and attracts inward
investment.
Here's that conversation.
So I'm delighted to be joined today by
Paul Meredith, who's from the University of Swansea.
Hello, Paul. Welcome to the podcast.
Oh, hi, my team. Good to see you.
Of course, we knew each other back in
the nineteen nineties. You and me were back
at the, University of Cambridge, the Cavendish.
What did what were you doing there? You
were a post doc there, weren't you?
I was yeah. I was a a DTI
post doctoral fellow in polymer colloids with with
you and Sam and and Athena Donald.
And then after you left the Cavendish, you
went off to industry, didn't you? You had
a few years at Procter and Gamble.
Yeah. That's right. I was 1995,
I think. That's right. I I left the
Cavendish,
joined joined Procter and Gamble as a product
development scientist. I was basically, I think, the
the rogue physicist in the in the department.
It was good fun. I was I was
with Procter for for six years in,
the
technical center in Agam.
And then after that, of course, you know,
you went off to Australia. And do you
wanna tell us about the career that you
had there? You were there for over a
decade and a half, I think, in Queensland.
Yeah. I was.
University of Queensland,
in Brisbane. Beautiful university.
It was quite an unknown back order, I
must say, at that time, 02/2001
that was. We went over in January, February
'2 thousand and '1. And,
they they had an idea of of starting
up a materials physics effort,
in their physics department there. So I was
a young lecturer. My wife and I had
gone on on honeymoon to Australia the year
before, and we'd sort of fallen in love
with it really, as you do.
So I started up at, started up at
Queensland there in 02/2001.
Not much to start with, to be honest.
An empty desk, an empty office, an empty
whiteboard, and no lab. So it really start
from my thing. And, we were there for
seventeen years
and until till 2017
and really gradually there built up an effort
in what I now call sort of sustainable
advanced materials that is,
semiconductor, dielectric, metal, functional materials where where you
were thinking about the embodied energy in the
in the material system itself and started working
with things like molecular semiconductors.
And,
that that grew into quite a large effort.
A lot of work around bioelectronics
at the time, which really wasn't a word
that was was in nomenclature, but but really
thinking about how we interface advanced materials with
biological systems, and that's become,
quite a big deal now in the pharmaceutical
industry. And you hear words like electroceuticals
from from Smith and Glynn, etcetera. So, yeah,
lovely lovely time in Brisbane.
And, also got very interested at that time
in,
in renewable energy.
The the climate change realization was beginning to
happen,
and Australia was at the forefront of of
thinking about that problem. And,
I got into building large scale solar plants,
which is something a bit strange for a
physicist, a cosmet physicist, but,
we were the first university in the world
to build really big, large megawatt scale plant
on our campuses.
And that grew into
eventually
the university becoming the first one hundred percent
renewable university in the world when they made
a big investment in a big solar farm
in 2019, I think it was. But the
genesis of that was,
was was us building these, these arrays on
on-site. So a very diverse time in Australia,
and,
it was,
a very productive time for us as well.
So it sounds like you really had a,
you know, very successful career there. Australia must
have been, you know, a wonderful place to
be.
And then you came back to The UK
to Swansea. So there must have been, what
what made you come back back home? Because
you are originally from South Wales. I I
am. Yeah. I'm in my office at Singleton
here, and I can nearly see the hospital
I was born from. So, I'm I'm Swansea
born and bred. I was I was brought
up on the edge of the Gower
Peninsula, which everybody knows, a little village called
Wannowlife.
And,
left here in 1989
after qualifying,
with a degree in physics from this university,
from this department, and never really thinking that
I'd be back. But,
in 02/2016,
'2 thousand '17, we we made the personal
decision to come to come back as a
family to The United Kingdom.
And,
it was sort of natural
that,
that, you know, I I come and take
a look at Swansea and friends and family
still here. And at the time, Swansea was
essentially trying to expand its physics offering and
and really was looking for some advanced materials
activity,
and that fitted us. And I was fortunate
enough to be awarded
a national research chair from the Circumbria Programme.
At the time, the Welsh government was expanding
its science base.
And so, we decided this would be the
right move. And, we moved part of our
group from from University of Queensland in Brisbane
here. I brought three of our our best
and brightest with us to South Wales, bit
of a culture shock for them.
And, we started again, again from nothing,
which seems to be a theme, and
created over the next sort of three or
four years even during COVID,
a fairly substantial effort in what we were
then and are calling sustainable advanced materials as
a thing.
So that's why we we came back really.
So the reason we got you on the
podcast, Paul, is I came down to see
you a couple of weeks ago to, the
Center for Integrative Semiconductor
Materials,
which looks an amazing place when I came
around. I was very impressed by it. So
do you wanna explain what that what that
place does and, what what are the aims
of it so people who don't know about
it?
Well,
it's,
you know, it's a it's a brand brand
new facility that you saw. And thanks for
coming down. We really enjoyed having you.
And it is a response.
And it's a response
of, I guess our university
to the,
to the core to support
the rapid growth of the semiconductor manufacturing industry
in South Wales.
Not a lot of people know this, but,
kind of Silicon Valley is is springing up
along the M 4 Corridor, so to speak,
particularly focused on the manufacturing of advanced semiconductor
systems, particularly compound and wide gap
systems, not really the the the traditional silicon
world of processors
that's owned by Intel and TSMC,
but very high end advanced
semiconductor technology along the M 4 Corridor.
We've got companies like, KLA, large American
tool and metrology manufacturer.
Power semiconductor company Vishay have just moved into
the region and bought one of the big
manufacturing facilities up near Newport.
Leader in in global epitaxy,
IQE.
And then all of the supply chains around
that, including packaging companies like Microchip. So it's
it's a really exciting time in South Wales.
And this is beginning to happen around about
2017, '20 '18, big time, big investments being
made. And so,
you know, we we saw that as a
university, we needed to help feed that ecosystem.
And so came up with this concept of
of building a kind of a research development
innovation and pilot and translational facility
to support that semiconductor ecosystem,
particularly focusing on the technology areas that were
of relevance to those companies.
And it turns out that,
power electronics and wide band gap, high efficiency
power electronics is is high on the agenda
down here
as is high end optoelectronics.
If you have a smart phone, it's very
likely that you have a vertical cavity service
emitting laser in it that was grown in
in South Wales and was patent elsewhere.
So looking at what was really the core
of of what those industries needed. And then,
of course,
you know, to do that, you've got to
build something which is not just relevant for
doing one of a kind research and development
that universities in Britain do very well,
but also is capable then of taking semiconductor
technology and scaling it.
So the CISM, standing for Centre for Integrated
Semiconductor Materials, like you said, the word integrative
is very important.
Our focus is on the development of support
of technology to a cross semiconductor platform.
You know, and, and that's really where,
I think we have a, a really interesting
new competitive advantage in The UK semiconductor industry.
So these concepts around heterogeneous integration of semiconductor
platforms.
So CISM basically
is, an RD and I facility, but it's
it's built and designed in the principles of
a semiconductor manufacturing plant. We call these things
fabs,
in in the semiconductor vernacular. That means clean
fabrication environment. So the word fab is is
our slang for that. So it's basically a
mini me fab,
of the type that, you know, Infineon or
any other big semiconductor company would build. And
in fact, it's designed on very similar principles.
So, it's designed to have higher time
potential for twenty four seven, three 60 five
operation and the potential not just to be
able to make one device once,
but to be able to process tens or
hundreds of wafers
to scale a process and to demonstrate that
a particular technology is is viable.
So, anyway, we started building that in
2020,
right in the guts of COVID, actually. The
summer of COVID was when we came out
of the ground.
And
this year, 2025,
we'll see our first full operational year. So
you you saw you saw the fab a
couple of weeks ago.
It was pretty full.
There was a lot of people working in
there. Particularly, we were running a training course
that we'll talk about in a second.
So all in all,
it's a modern research and development and innovation
facility that's designed to be a a pilot
translation facility for the for The UK semiconductor
industry. And, of course, that's very pertinent at
the moment as, as as we're in the
in the middle of designing a new national
strategy for semiconductor manufacturing and semiconductors that frontier
of many things, artificial intelligence, quantum technology, the
clean energy revolution, net zero, electrification of cars,
you name it. It's advanced semiconductors that are
gonna that are gonna enable all of that.
So that's the context of of CISM anyway.
So when I came around, Paul, I saw
some you showed me some pretty cool facilities
there. Do you wanna,
tell us about some of the ones that
you're particularly proud of at the at the
at the, the center?
Yeah. So it's
the the heart of the facility is is
a is a big clean room.
And the clean room itself is a thousand
meters squared,
which is quite a large cleanroom for a
university to build.
And,
on the cleanroom floor, as we call it,
there are semiconductor processing tools. There are tools
that
deposit atom by atom semiconductors, dielectrics, and metals
that build up the layers of a semiconductor
device.
There are tools that etch away to create
three-dimensional structures, atom by atom. We we specialize
in in so called dry etching with gas
chemistry.
Traditional etching and semiconductors has has been done
with liquids like hydrofluoric acid, etcetera.
So,
etching equipment of of which is state of
the art, and then the patterning equipment to
set down the patterns of the semiconductor tech
devices, the lithography, the so called lithography
as well. So areas for lithography, deposition, and
etch,
and, and also,
some pretty bespoke equipment,
which is sort of, I suppose, tuned to
what,
to what our industry partners are interested in.
So we hold, for example,
The UK's national pilot line for producing silicon
carbide power electronic components.
That's funded by something called Driving the Electric
Revolution,
under the industry challenge industry strategy challenge fund
of the last government.
And we also hold a really nice new
facility for for the epitaxial deposition
of gallium oxide and other wide gap oxides.
It's a metal organic CVD reactor,
and that's the EPSRC
national facility for producing gallium oxide. And we've
just commissioned it. So we've just got the
first gallium oxide
epitaxy out of it in the last couple
of weeks. So it's, it's been a pretty
exciting couple of weeks for us. So that's
some of the things that we're pretty proud
of.
Also quite self sufficient for characterization and analysis.
It's it's very important, obviously, that you understand
what you're growing, what you're etching,
etcetera. And so
a a a large suite of of characterization
equipment including very, very high end electron microscopy
scanning probe,
for example.
And the great thing is when I came
down, Paul, you showed me, well, we talked
to some of the students who had come
down from across The UK to learn about
some of the techniques of particularly how to
make semiconductors and scale them. And but that's
one of the real things about the center,
isn't it? To get, training for students in
the art of doing some of this work.
Yeah. I'm glad you used the word art
because it it sort of hovers sometimes between
art, science, technology, and engineering.
And there is there's a skill shortage in
the semiconductor industry across the globe, not just
in The United Kingdom, but particularly in The
United Kingdom. And as I said, we've we've
got,
we've got companies that are growing rapidly in
the region, and,
they need us to train,
and they need us to train
students at all level, actually, the technical levels
all the way from apprentice through to, you
know, very specialist PhDs.
And they need to be trained on equipment
and on processes
that are relevant
to those being used in the manufacturing scenario.
So we've really taken a strategic decision to
to have that as the core of our
of our training strategy, if you like. It's
relevant practical training on tools that they're going
to use
immediately if they go into the industrial environment.
And so,
together with partners in University Leeds and Cambridge
University and the Rice Institute, the the Henry
Rice Institute,
we put together a training course
five days.
And it's really about teaching all the practical
skills from woah to go,
that some would need to operate in a
clean room.
And in fact, the students,
make throughout the period of a week, Monday
to Friday,
they make
working devices. In this case, we made high
electron mobility transistors from epitaxial gallium nitride from
two DEG gallium nitride that was grown for
us at Cambridge by a colleague Dave Ritchie.
And so all of the all of the
students made working transistors by the end of
end of the Friday.
You were fortunate enough to see them on
the Friday giving their talks and presenting their
results, and and we gave a a prize
for the best off on off ratio, which
was 10 to the five, pretty good for
a a hemp transistor, I'd say.
So that's been something, of course, has been
evolving over a period of three years.
Started it at Leeds. We ran it at
the Bragg Clean Room in Leeds for two
years, the previous two years, and it was
our turn. And it was a big deal
for us because
the course tested all of the elements of
the fab for the first time. And so,
very hard work for everybody preparing for it
and then delivering it over the week, but
we're very proud of the fact that we
managed it. 20 students were put through the
course, four industrial engineers, 16 from
universities all around The UK.
We had students from Cambridge,
Manchester,
Sheffield, Liverpool,
Leeds, of course, our students,
from Swansea. So great success. And the other
nice thing was if you sort of map
the disciplines of those students, they were from
not just physics, but they were from electrical
engineering, mechanical engineering,
chemistry, chemical process engineering. The whole thing about
the semiconductor sector is it it requires
a broad range of multidisciplinary
skills. So, yeah, very pleased about that. And
as I say, we were lucky to have
you down on the Friday to see the
outcome of that, and you were able to
talk to some of the students. And I
think some of them were quite complimentary about
their experience. The feedback has certainly been brilliant
on it. But one of the things you
really impressed me on with when I was
there, Paul, was just how important the center
is for the South Wales economy.
And you showed me that map when we
were sitting in the office of it was
a map of South Wales and little lights
flashed to indicate local businesses in this area.
And there's a huge cluster of companies, and
it's a really important
effort for that economy, isn't it? And we
also when you pick me up from the
station at, Port Talbot, there's the steel factory
from Tata.
And, you know, that traditionally was the big,
you know, really important employer. So this is
it's transformational, isn't it, the center?
Well, you know,
if every economy goes through
periodic transformations, right, every manufacturing advanced economy, you
know.
And,
down in South Wales, this was, you know,
arguably the place
part of the industrial revolution started with coal
mining and iron ore and copper.
So once it used to be called Copperopolis
in the '17 '18 hundreds.
And, of course, steel and coal are very
important parts of our economy. My
family are all miners.
But, mining is no more, in this part
of the world, and it's, it's really,
it's really interesting to see,
as we see foundational industries on the decline,
the simultaneous
rise of new high-tech industries.
And, you know, call it serendipity,
or or call it a bit of intervention
from government.
That's what we're seeing here.
And so,
as we see jobs lost in Port Alberts,
we see the need for retraining those sometimes
very highly skilled people,
into the semiconductor
sector.
And the thing that really characterises our sector
is the very high value add a gross
value add to the local economy.
The calculations from our colleagues up at, the
Welsh Economic Research Unit in Cardiff University that
track this,
reckon that
a job in our cluster, in our in
our semiconductor cluster, contributes roughly three times the
national average gross value add to the local
economy. So each job to us about a
hundred and £50,000
per year
actually delivered back into the economy of South
Wales, and that's very significant. And so it's
a it's a really, really important part of
of the rebirth of of this region. So,
yeah, I think, you know, what we're seeing
here is,
is nationally significant.
I think we're seeing
quite considerable
activity and inward investment.
Companies moving into the region, I mentioned Vishay
Intertechnology,
a couple of minutes ago. Vishay is an
American company
And, they've moved into the region making very
significant investments,
bought,
the eight inch silicon wafer fab up in
Newport that was originally built by Infineon.
Likewise,
KLA Tencor,
purchased a company called SPTS, which was an
indigenous tool making company here, and now we're
expanding. In fact,
they have are just about to complete their
European headquarter build in Newport. So it's not
just
acquiring an asset. It's it's making very, very
substantial inward investments here. At the moment,
our estimates are that there's probably about two
and a half thousand direct jobs in the
region with a multiplier on top of that,
And we could see that tracking out to
over 3,000 jobs now in the next couple
of years,
with the commensurate add of,
of, you know, Iqimaq Valley to the to
the region. So
interesting times, and that has to be underpinned
has to be underpinned then by the sort
of support that we're trying to provide. And
and Cardiff University is trying to provide skills,
people, process support,
a place to develop technology. And the other
thing that I think, you know, has been
exciting for us is is our ability to
incubate companies.
That's been something that's been really difficult in
in the semiconductor sector for decades.
If you're a smart person, smart young PhD
student or something that's got an idea for
a semiconductor widget or a new device or
a new process,
you're only gonna be able to prove that,
you know, if you're gonna have access to
equipment in a fab worth tens or hundreds
of millions of pounds. So how do you
do that as a as an entrepreneur, especially
as a young entrepreneur?
Well, the answer is you need to find
somebody and somewhere that will will bring you
in, support you, give you access to facilities,
and that's something that we've dialed into this
this new center now.
And in fact,
I can't tell you who, but we will
be,
we will hopefully be having our first incubation
tenant move in to CISM within the next
two months. And it's a local company
that really needs a state of the art
fab to prove what they need to do.
And so, you know, that is at the
heart of how Silicon Valley grew in the
fifties and sixties, for example. And so I
think there's a parallel there.
So you've got quite a success story. I
mean, what what can you do to persuade
other companies and governments to invest further in
into the South Wales area? Because you must
want to attract more, don't you? You know,
you've got a great base to start from.
Yeah. I I think
I think
culturally,
we're down here. We're we're not people who
shout about things too much. Right?
That's fairly typical. But I think we do
need to get out there and we have
been getting out there more.
A lot of what's happened
in the region has been what you might
call,
organic growth.
That is to say companies getting together in
a semi organized self self organized fashion.
In fact, our cluster is called CS connected,
CS for compound semiconductor
connected,
and
that degree of coordination gives you critical mass.
And so with critical mass comes a voice,
with critical mass,
comes the,
the attraction for inward investment.
And we've started talking about the cluster done
here in South Wales as being the fifth
semiconductor cluster in Europe, 4 of which are
based on silicon on the continent around Grenoble,
Dresden, for example.
And this is the first compound semiconductor cluster
in Europe,
and,
the fifth overall. So we're starting to talk
in those terms about it now that we
feel that we've got the critical mass, and
that word is getting out there.
You know, sometimes it's it's if I could
be honest, it's a little bit disappointing when
when our leadership and our politicians talk about,
you know, growth in other parts of the
country,
and and fail to appreciate
the, you know, the the the natural growth
that's happening down here.
But,
it's beholding on us now to to to
to be in there, to be talking about
it. That's why I'm coming on your podcast,
and to be a little bit more proactive.
Our industry base is growing. Our industry base
is more influenced as it as it as
it grows and as it makes those investments.
So I'm very hopeful that over the next
couple of years, there'll be people outside South
Wales that appreciate that South Wales is now
the center of The UK semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem.
And one of the really important things that
you mentioned when I visited Paul was the
importance of,
the local
local people knowing that this is a a
career to go into. And you've done a
lot going out into the community,
building awareness of semiconductors as this is a
sort of a definite proper career path that
people can go into all levels.
Do you wanna say a bit about what
you've done? Because it's it's been I found
it fascinating what you did.
Yeah. It's,
you know,
often traditionally,
if you've been you've been trained in this
area, you often have to move away to
get the job that, you know, is commensurate
with your training. I did. I had to
leave in 1989.
And and people still think that that's the
case, but it's not anymore.
And we've got to get that message out
to youngsters. We've got to get it out
to their parents.
We've got
to sell
the, the case,
for working in our industry in a way
that, you know, the steel industry and the
coal industry has done for a hundred years
in in this part of the world.
So some of the things that we're doing
well, first of all, there's a there's a
coordinated
set of activities and and and, if you
like, a strategy, a regional strategy on this
that that is rolling out across the cluster.
We've got some important projects,
funded from various streams,
by the Welsh and and the UK government
and Cardiff Capital Region City Deal, for example.
But it's about hearts and minds. And,
there's a program, for example, called Start Seni,
which is run by a colleague of mine,
professor Owen Guy, who's the head of chemistry
here.
And Owen has developed,
for example,
a whole set of
virtual reality, augmented reality
materials.
He goes out with headsets into schools.
He puts the kids inside virtual fab environments.
They learn about, you know,
the importance of semiconductors to them,
and to society,
and it becomes something that that they are
familiar with. They understand that inside their smartphone,
you know, or maybe 80 or 90 different
semiconductor
types and components.
They begin to understand these things. And one
really nice thing he did, this is South
Wales, of course, so we love our rugby.
And,
he had a a very nice, very successful
program. I think he reached over 12,000
school children,
of of junior school age,
was to go out,
with, in partnership, the Newport Gwent
franchise, the Dragons franchise rugby franchise in Newport,
you know, and some pretty famous Welsh rugby
players like Jamie Roberts, who was going out
into schools,
you know, on a Wednesday afternoon, for example,
and doing an hour of rugby.
And Owen was managing had has managed to
to partner with that so that that the
children were getting an hour of rugby, and
then they were getting half an hour of
semiconductors
as well. So they were going home telling
their moms and dads that they'd, you know,
played with Jamie Roberts, but also that they'd
learned about these funny thing called semiconductors. So
that's where you start to get inside people
and and get them to, to appreciate and
realize that there's an opportunity for them. And
as more and more of our graduates from
from our technical colleges and and our universities
start to populate that industry,
then it's, it's organic at that point in
time, then word-of-mouth comes into play. It's a
very nice example.
During the nineties when I was trained doing
my PhD up in Heriot Watt in Edinburgh
in semiconductors,
there was, there was a phenomena known as
Silicon Glen.
Companies like Motorola
had a manufacturing presence between Glasgow and Edinburgh,
and literally thousands of Scots went into that
industry.
And for maybe twenty, twenty five years after
that, everywhere you went in the world in
the semiconductor sector, whether it be Taiwan or
or The US or your, you would hear
a Scottish accent around you. Yeah?
And so, you know, our ambition is that
in the next decade, wherever you go in
the world, you might hear a lilting South
Wales accent coming at you. That would be
our ambition anyway, because that means that we've
we've managed to, you know, train an indigenous
base of,
of of people.
I should add that you're right down near
the, you know, Swansea Bay and the beach.
So that's a great attraction to get students
super particularly sporty to once they've, clocked off
on a Friday, they can head off down
to the beach with their,
for a bit of,
exercise down there. Yeah. The the fab on
the beach we call we call CSM
and,
surfing and semiconductors
and rugby. That's what it's all about.
So looking ahead, final question, Paul.
I guess you're gonna be optimistic about next
steps. What what are the next big plans
for the center?
Okay. Well,
number one,
we we we come to full operational
commissioning. So 100% of the tools working.
Then,
it sounds like small steps, but they're not.
Then increasing capacity,
increasing throughput, and increasing the utilization of the
tools. So increasing the
number of hours of of uptime that we
have
per year, per day, turning it into something
which maybe is capable of running shift patterns
so that we're beginning to utilize the infrastructure.
Universities, with all due respect,
tend to have a large amount of capital
infrastructure that that that's not terribly well utilized,
particularly our high end research infrastructure,
that we can do a better job with.
So that that's kind of on on our
pathway.
Very excited about the incubation opportunity as, say,
our first company coming in this year that
you'll hear more about.
And
and then building from that then
really,
consistent programs of support for KLA and Vishay
and Microchip and IQE and all of the
other companies that
are along the M4 Corridor
and us then being the magnet
for smaller SME based inward investment coming coming
into South Wales. So that's that's kind of
what our trajectory
is. We can't also, you know, go past
the fact that
CSM is also designed to do really frontier
semiconductor research and development.
And so as the fab really begins to
run up,
I wanna see very, very high impact papers
and and technology coming out of the fab,
and for people internationally to know who we
are,
as, you know, as one of the premier
facilities.
Well, look, Paul, I think you've got a
brilliant story down there. And, thank you for
inviting me, and thanks for coming on the
podcast. And I really do wish you all
the best with, the center. It's,
you know, you deserve a lot of success,
and you're doing great stuff there. So thanks
for coming on the podcast, Paul. And,
yeah, hope to be in touch with you,
and all the best for the future. No
worries, Mateen. Thanks for, thanks for giving me
the opportunity to talk to you. Cheers, mate.
That was Swansea University's
Paul Meredith
in conversation with our very own Matin Durrani.
Thanks to both of them for a fascinating
discussion.
One of the first and finest
philosophical treatments of quantum mechanics
is how one academic
describes the work of the German physicist
and philosopher,
Greta Hermann,
who was born in nineteen o one. While
she sparred with the likes of Werner Heisenberg
and John von Neumann,
Hermann's contributions
to quantum science have only recently come to
light.
In a new feature article in Physics World,
the writer and physicist
Sydney Perkowitz
illuminates
Hermann's extraordinary
life
from her early days as Emmy Noether's
PhD student
to her groundbreaking
work on hidden variables and causality
in quantum mechanics.
Unfortunately,
few physicists were aware of her papers when
they came out, and Perkowitz says that if
her work had been more widely known, it
could have altered
the early development
of quantum mechanics.
You can find that article on the Physics
World website.
Just look for the headline,
Greta Herman,
the quantum physicist
who challenged Werner Heisenberg
and John von Neumann.
I'm afraid that's all the time we have
for this week's podcast.
Thanks to Paul Meredith and Matin Durrani for
a great discussion.
And a special thanks to our producer, Fred
Ailes.
Next week, our guest is Ference Krauss,
who shared the 2023
Nobel Prize for Physics for developing
experimental
methods
that generate
attosecond
pulses of light for the study of electron
dynamics
in matter.
In a conversation with Physics World's Tammy Freeman,
Krauss explains how attosecond
physics
is poised
to revolutionize
health care.
Tune in next week to hear that interview.