Project FAB's main aim to achieve an increase in the enjoyment of science lessons for primary school students. By doing this, we aim to increase the number of children wanting to pursue a scientific career. We also aim to increase the confidence of senior high school students in communicating scientific ideas, and teaching them to younger pupils. We hope that this will not only boost their chances of employment or acceptance to higher/further education, but will fuel their individual passion for scientific subjects. Another of our aims is to increase the confidence of primary school teachers in teaching science in a fun and engaging manner. One of the main aims of our project is to inform young people about science. We plan to teach senior high school students the intricacies of the project and recruit them to help teach primary school children. This will give pupils a basic understanding of atomic structure, gravity, the relationship between temperature and pressure, greenhouse gases, and particle physics. Furthermore, we will help older students to expand this understanding by learning about cosmic rays, gravitational waves, and climate change. The high school students will help to lead lessons about high altitude ballooning, which will provide them with the opportunity to become more confident in their scientific knowledge and get first-hand experience teaching. During these lessons, we will carry out exciting experiments which will engage the children and make some of the more difficult aspects of our project easier for them to understand. We also aim to run an after school club for the high school students which will give them the opportunity to learn about microcontroller programming. We hope that giving pupils this basic knowledge of physics will inspire them to become more involved in science and pursue a career in science. We aim to carry out four major experiments, consisting of three high altitude balloons, each measuring a different property of the atmosphere with the equipment attached. With one balloon we aim to measure the change in magnitude of radiation, caused by high energy cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere, as a function of altitude using a scintillating plastic. With a second balloon we aim to measure the change of gravitational force as a function of altitude, and demonstrate that objects do in fact fall at the same rate. We also hoe measure atmospheric temperature and pressure as a function of altitude. Our aim for the third and final balloon is to measure the concentration of Carbon Dioxide, Ozone, and Methane. Using the concentrations of Ozone, we aim to show that the absorption of UV radiation raises atmospheric temperature. Also, by comparing levels of Methane and Carbon Dioxide to pre-industrial revolution levels we aim to show that levels of these gases do contribute to global climate change. Our hope is that we can use these experiments to illustrate the things the pupils have learned in the classroom, as well as using images captured on-board to really spark their imaginations and love of science.

Some of the most exciting experiments planned in the UK and internationally - from studying extreme light-matter interactions, to the exploitation of quantum technologies - are demanding unpreceded performance in mirror coating technology. Optical thin film coatings appear ubiquitously in the technology around us, however current available performances will not meet the requirements for, and will thus limit the exploitation from, many of these experiments. For example, emerging extreme light-matter experiments are now handling power densities an order of magnitude higher than those previously achieved. This includes major UK infrastructures, including the Central Laser Facility (CLF) and the Scottish Centre for the Application of Plasma-based Accelerators (SCAPA), in addition to partnership initiatives in Europe including the 850MEuro European funded Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI). All these experiments will soon require laser damage threshold (LDT) performance in the highly reflective mirrors at a level not currently available. This proposal, for the first time, will seek to exploit advanced optical coating technologies, developed with the field of gravitational wave astronomy, for use in intense-light matter experiments. Moreover, the capabilities developed will significantly support existing activities within the Quantum Technologies for Fundamental Physics (QTFP) and the UK's continued effort in gravitational wave astronomy.

Today's communication networks need to be supported by an ultra-broadband optical backbone in order to respond to the enormous demand for data exchange. Without the use of photonic components, the "magic" of being 24/7connected on a global scale just by using our portable devices would be impossible. Recently, a new branch of science, called plasmonics, has gained great momentum in the scientific community, since it brings the promise to be complementary to photonics. For instance, in the realm of plasmonics, devices can function on a nanometric scale (1 nanometer [nm] = a billionth of a meter), with consequent advantages in terms of versatility, scalability, and reduced power consumption. The proposed project "Tunable plasmonics for Ultrafast Switching at Telecom Wavelengths" is focused on novel materials for plasmonic applications (namely titanium nitride -TiN; and aluminum doped zinc oxide - AZO). Besides solving fundamental issues typical of plasmonic devices such as poor transparency and low damage threshold, these two materials unable the possibility to engineer the light-matter interaction at will. This can be achieved either by changing the fabrication procedure or in a more dynamic fashion by means of an external excitation such as a laser beam or an applied voltage. The core active material at the center of this project is a new kind of AZO developed inside the collaborative effort between Heriot-Watt University in UK, and the Birck Nanotechnology Center in USA. This "special" AZO is grown by unconventional methods and it exhibits ultrafast optical response (i.e. after the material properties are altered by an optical pulse, it restores its original behavior on a time scale shorter than 1 ps = 1/1000000000000 sec). One fundamental goal of this project is gaining a deep knowledge of the physical mechanism behind the ultra-fast behavior of AZO (still not fully understood) and use this knowledge to further optimize the material for application in ultra-fast photonics. In addition to this, in order to properly evaluate the potentials of both AZO and TiN in the real world, this project includes the fabrication and testing of an optical modulator prototype (the modulator being the most fundamental building block for encoding information). This device will be interfaced with the external world with input/output TiN-based plasmonic waveguides and will exploit AZO as active core material for performing the ultra-fast signal encoding. Numerical simulations foresee outstanding performances in terms of compactness, reduced power consumption, and ultra-fast operational speed.

Atomically thin materials offer a new paradigm for control of electronic excitations in the extreme two-dimensional (2D) limit in condensed matter. Recently this concept has been developed further when artificial potentials for electrons were created in heterostructures consisting of stacked 2D layers held together by van der Waals forces, and light was used to access and manipulate electronic spin and valley degrees of freedom in atomically-thin semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). A significant world-wide effort in the last 5 years has resulted in intense studies of optical properties of TMDC atomic layers in the linear regime. Here, we propose to use this new class of (2D) semiconducting crystals to demonstrate unexplored approaches to exploiting nonlinear optical phenomena on the nano-scale in regimes unattainable by other ultra-fast photonic materials. To achieve this, we will exploit robust excitonic complexes observable up to room T, which will be generated and controlled in artificially created vertical stacks of 2D atomic layers. Giant nonlinearities enabling ultra-fast control of light with light of low intensity will be realised and explored in such van der Waals heterostructures placed in optical microcavities, operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime that we demonstrated recently. In this regime part-light-part-matter polaritons are formed, with the exciton part responsible for the strong nonlinearity and the photon part providing efficient coupling to light. This work will open a new route to development of highly nonlinear nano-photonic devices such as miniature ultra-fast modulators and switches, with high potential to impact on a new generation of signal processing and quantum technology hardware.

Hybrid polaritonics combines the properties of different light emitting materials - organic polymers and semiconductors - in order to produce quasiparticles that combine the possibilities of both systems. "Polaritons" are quasi-particles that arise from strong coupling between light and matter. This means that they have hybrid properties, combining the mobility and flexibility of light, with the possibilities of interactions due to the matter component. At high enough densities, or low enough temperatures, polaritons can form a macroscopic coherent quantum state, a polariton condensate, or a polariton laser. Such a coherent state shows much of the same physics as Bose Einstein Condensation, as has been seen for cold atoms, but without requiring the ultra-low tempeatures required for atoms. Hybid polaritonics focuses on how, by combining different "matter" parts of the polariton, one can push these temperatures even higher, up to room temperature, and how one can engineer completely tunable system. The matter part of a polariton can come from any material which will absorb and emit light at a specific wavelength. Much existing work on polaritons is based on the material being inorganic semiconductors. These can be grown controllably, and one can drive such devices by passing an electrical current through them to make a polariton laser. However, the coupling between matter and light in semiconductors is not strong enough for these devices to work at room temperature. In contrast, organic molecules and polymers can show huge coupling strengths, but are generally poor electrical conductors. Our programme is to combine the benefits of both systems to provide a whole set of devices, operating at room temperature, based on the formation of polaritons. These devices will range from polariton lasers (providing a route to easily tunable lasers with very low threshold currents), to Terrahertz light sources (with applications in non-invasive medical imaging and explosives detection), to ultra-efficient light emitting diodes. To reach these ambitious objectives, we need to combine expertise from a wide number of fields. Our team contains world experts in light emitting polymers, semiconductor growth, characterisation and spectroscopy of polaritons, and in theoretical modelling. Members of our team have previously achieved the first realisations of polariton lasing, of strong coupling with organic materials, and of building hybrid polariton lasers. The possibility to combine this expertise draws on the unique strengths that the UK currently has in this area, and enables the combination of this expertise to be focussed on providing room temperature devices based on hybrid polaritonics, and to revolutionise this field.