The sixth CDT-CMP Annual Conference was held on 18 September 2020. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the organising committee decided to hold the conference in its entirety online (via Zoom) for the first time.

A day-long conference was an excellent opportunity for student researchers to present their work and many fruitful discussions emerged.  The programme featured 10 short talks contributed by Year 2, 3 & 4 students. Students also presented their research in a virtual poster session preceded by flash-talks.

Invited external speakers Prof Phil King from the University of St Andrews and Tobias Lindstrom from the National Physical Laboratory gave thought-provoking talks followed by engaging Q&A sessions.

At the end of the conference all participants were given an opportunity to vote for the best talk and the best poster session.

A talk titled “Josephson phenomena in van der Waal heterostructures” by Liam Farrar (Bath) won the vote for best talk and it is now available for viewing via the video icon below.

The prize for the best poster went jointly to (i) Lukas Ohnoutek (Bath) for the poster titled “Determination of chirality in miniscule volumes by measuring hyper Rayleigh scatteringoptical activity” and (ii) Will Luckin (Bath) for the poster titled “Modelling of the CDW phase of TaSe₂ with a tight-binding model”.

Special thanks and tokens of appreciation were given to the students who helped with the organisation of the conference – Jarrod Lewis (Bristol) and Aimee Nevill (Bath).

All talks from the conference are available on a private YouTube channel and the link can be requested from the CDT-CMP Manager.