In this research programme, planetary scientists and engineers from the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre have joined forces to answer important questions concerning the origin and evolution of asteroids, the Moon and Mars. The emphasis of our work is on understanding the thermal histories of these planetary bodies over a range of time and distance scales, and how water and carbon-rich molecules have been transported within and between them. One part of the consortium will explore the formation and subsequent history of asteroids. Our focus is on primitive asteroids, which have changed little since they formed 4500 million years ago within a cloud of dust and gas called the solar nebula. These bodies are far smaller than the planets, but are scientifically very important because they contain water and carbon-rich molecules, both of which are essential to life. We want to understand the full range of materials that went to form these asteroids, and where in the solar nebular they came from. Although they are very primitive, most of these asteroids have been changed by chemical reactions that were driven by liquid water, itself generated by the melting of ice. We will ask whether the heat needed to melt this ice was produced by the decay of radioactive elements, or by collisions with other asteroids. The answer to this question has important implications for understanding how asteroids of all types evolved, and what we may find when samples of primitive asteroids are collected and returned to Earth. Pieces of primitive asteroids also fall to Earth as meteorites, and bring with them some of their primordial water, along with molecules that are rich in carbon. Many scientists think that much of the water on Earth today was obtained from outer space, and consortium researchers would like to test this idea. In order to understand the nature and volume of water and carbon that would have been delivered by meteorites, we first need to develop reliable ways to distinguish extraterrestrial carbon and water from the carbon and water that has been added to the meteorite after it fell to Earth. We plan to do this by identifying 'fingerprints' of terrestrial water and carbon so that they can be subtracted from the extraterrestrial components. One of the main ways in which this carbon was delivered to Earth during its earliest times was by large meteorites colliding with the surface of our planet at high velocities. Thus we also wish to understand the extent to which the extraterrestrial carbon was preserved or transformed during these energetic impact events. The formation and early thermal history of the moon is another area of interest for the consortium. In particular, we will ask when its rocky crust was formed, and use its impact history to determine meteorite flux throughout the inner solar system. To answer these questions we will analyse meteorites and samples collected by the Apollo and Luna missions to determine the amounts of chemical elements including argon and lead that these rocks contain. Information on the temperature of surface and sub-surface regions of Mars can help us to understand processes including the interaction of the planet's crust with liquid water. In order to be able to explore these processes using information on the thermal properties of martian rocks that will soon to be obtained by the NASA InSight lander, we will undertake a laboratory study of the effects of heating and cooling on a simulated martian surface. Hot water reaching the surface of Mars from its interior may once have created environments that were suitable for life to develop, and minerals formed by this water could have preserved the traces of any microorganisms that were present. We will assess the possibility that such springs could have preserved traces of past martian life by examining a unique high-altitude hot spring system on Earth.

Pathology is the branch of medicine that studies the cause, origin, and nature of diseases through the examination of tissue biopsies at a microscopic level. Pathology slides are traditionally handled by cutting a tissue sample into paper-thin sections, and staining them so to bring out regions of interest (RoIs). A pathologist places these paper-thin sections on a glass slide under a microscope in order to look for a range of features that aid in confirming the presence and malignancy level of the disease. For example, in the case of cancer biopsies, the pathologist analyses the shape, size and amount of abnormal and normal cell nuclei in the tissue to confirm the existence and progression of the tumour. Recent advances on whole-slide digital scanners have made possible the digitization of pathology slides, allowing their storage and manipulation in digital form. The digitized versions of pathology slides, which are called virtual slides or whole-slide images (WSIs), are complementing traditional analysis techniques that rely on pathologists looking under a microscope with techniques that rely on pathologists looking at digital images on a monitor. Moreover, digitization of these slides also allows providing telepathology services by sharing WSIs and thus reaching isolated hospitals and medical centres. For example, thanks to telepathology, pathologists would be able to send WSIs electronically to others or post them on a secure web-site making them available for consultation with other pathologists. As a consequence, more pathologists may be brought into the process of making a diagnosis, thus avoiding medical errors. Due to the high resolution required to digitize pathology slides, the resulting WSIs tend to be huge in file size, which results in heavy demands for storage and transmission resources. For example, the digitization of a single core of prostate biopsy tissue, of roughly the dimensions of a stamp, could easily result in 900 million pixels. By comparison, a photograph of 4x5 inches in size scanned at 300 dots per inch, which is the standard resolution for printing in a magazine, results in only 1.8 million pixels. So, WSIs usually require around 500 times more pixels than regular digital images. Moreover, a single pathology study normally comprises more than one biopsy sample. For example, in the case of prostate cancer studies, more than 10 biopsy samples are often required per patient, resulting in hundreds of gigabytes of imaging data per study. As a consequence, the main challenge that currently prevents telepathology from being widely used in clinical settings is the huge file size of WSIs, which makes the access and transmission of these data over different channels lengthy. Additionally, their huge file size also prevents WSIs from being widely used in current Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS), which comprise a collection of software and network infrastructure used in hospitals and medical centres to store, share and display medical images. Integrating WSIs into PACS would allow pathologist to use other patient data available in PACS in order to increase the accuracy of diagnosis. Therefore, designing efficient coding methods capable of facilitating the access and transmission of WSIs for telepathology applications, while allowing integrating these data into PACS, remains a challenge. This project is mainly concerned with the design of such methods.

'Language Acts and Worldmaking' argues that language is a material and historical force, not a transparent vehicle for thought. Language empowers us, by enabling us to construct our personal, local, transnational and spiritual identities; it can also constrain us, by carrying unexamined ideological baggage. This dialectical process we call 'worldmaking'. If one language gives us a sense of place, of belonging, learning another helps us move across time and place, to encounter and experience other ways of being, other histories, other realities. Thus, our project challenges a widely held view about ML learning. While it is commonly accepted that languages are vital in our globalised world, it is too often assumed that language learning is merely a neutral instrument of globalisation-a commercialised skill set, one of those 'transferable skills' that are part of a humanities education. Yet ML learning is a unique form of cognition and critical engagement. Learning a language means recognising that the terms, concepts, beliefs and practices that are embedded in it possess a history, and that that history is shaped by encounters with other cultures and languages. To regenerate and transform ML we must foreground language's power to shape how we live, and realise the potential of ML learning to open pathways between worlds past and present. Our project realises this potential by breaking down the standard disciplinary approaches that constrain Spanish and Portuguese within the boundaries of national literary and cultural traditions. We promote research that explores the vast multilingual and multicultural terrain constituted by the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, with their global empires and contact zones in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Understanding Iberia as both the originator and the product of global colonising movements places Iberian Studies on a comparative, transnational axis and emphasizes diasporic identities, historic postcolonial thinking, modern decolonial movements and transcultural exchange. Our research follows five paths linked by an interest in the movement of peoples and languages across time and place. 'Travelling concepts' researches the stories and vocabularies that construct Iberia as a cultural crossroads, a border between East and West, a homeland for Jews, Muslims and Christians. We examine the ideological work performed by the cultural semantics Iberia, Al-Andalus, and Sefarad in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German, Arabic, Hebrew and ladino (Judeo-Spanish), from the Middle Ages to the present, in Europe and beyond. 'Translation acts' turns to the theatrical narrative, investigating how words, as performed speech and embodied language create a world on stage. Through translation, we travel across time and space, interrogating the original words and bringing them to our time and place. This strand exploits theatre's capacity to (re)generate known and imagined worlds. 'Digital Modelling as an act of translation' examines the effects of digital, mobile and networked technology upon our concept of 'global' culture, and what kinds of 'translation' are enacted as information enters and leaves the digital sphere in the context of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures. 'Loaded Meanings and their history' demonstrates the centrality of historical linguistics to cultural understanding, by investigating the process and significance of the learned borrowings in Ibero-Romance. Such borrowings acquire 'loaded' meanings that reflect and shape people's attitudes and worldviews. Finally, the agents of language learning-teachers-are the focus of the fifth strand, 'Diasporic Identities and the Politics of Language Teaching'. This strand analyzes the life stories of native teachers of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan to identify the vocabularies and narrative patterns that help them make sense of and interrogate their professional and personal identities as transnational cultural agents in the UK.

Cavity-mediated cooling has emerged as the only general technique with the potential to cool molecular species down to the microkelvin temperatures needed for quantum coherence and degeneracy. The EuroQUAM CMMC project will link leading theoreticians and experimentalists, including the technique's inventors and experimental pioneers, to develop it into a truly practical technique, reinforcing European leadership in this field. Four major experiments will explore a spectrum of complementary configurations and cavity-mediated cooling will be applied to molecules for the first time; a comprehensive theoretical programme will meanwhile examine the underlying mechanisms and identify the optimal route to practicality. The close connections between theory and experiment, and between pathfinding and underpinning studies, will allow each to guide and inform the others, ensuring that cavity-mediated cooling is swiftly developed as a broad enabling technology for new realms of quantum coherent molecular physics and chemistry.The Southampton component will address, both experimentally and theoretically, fundamental aspects of the cooling process that result from the retarded interaction of a trapped molecule with its reflection in a single mirror, and developments of this prototype scheme that exploit nanostructured mirror arrays that can be produced in our fabrication facilities, and which show both geometric and plasmonic resonances. Our particular aims are hence to understand and explore the most basic version of cavity-mediated cooling, and to develop new implementations suitable for nanoscale integration as a future technology.

Quantum Information Theory (QIT) aims at exploiting the laws of quantum mechanics to outperform all classical information-processing methods. This is an intellectually and technologically extremely challenging endeavour, as the goal is to understand the ultimate physical limits of information processing, and to harness them for communication, encryption, computation and sensing. The Nobel Prizes to Haroche and Wineland (2012) and to Haldane, Kosterlitz and Thouless (2016) recognise the importance of this field. Dr. Masanes' theoretical research contributes to the development of "quantum simulators", one of the most relevant applications of QIT. Quantum simulators allow to physically implement any mathematical quantum model and observe its time evolution. This task is impossible with our current super-computers. The reason for this is that classical computers are so inefficient at simulating quantum systems that the process would take thousands of years. In contrast, quantum simulators allow us to observe the behaviour of any theoretical model within quantum physics, regardless of its mathematical complexity. Hence, they will become a powerful tool in many areas of science and industry, like the chemical, pharmaceutic and nano-technology industrires. Remarkably, quantum simulators are already being constructed with present-day quantum technology. In addition to new applications of quantum technology, QIT exports results and methods to produce breakthroughs and insights in other areas of physics. Some examples are the development of computational methods to study the properties of matter, the derivation of Einstein's gravity equations from the entanglement structure of a field theory, and the PI's proof of the Third Law of Thermodynamics from first principles, a subject of controversy going back to Nernst and Einstein. To introduce one of the main goals of this proposal, we recall that one of the most used approximation in the physical sciences is to describe a system that has been evolving for some time by a thermal or maximal-entropy state. This approximation is used even in closed quantum systems, where entropy does not increase. Remarkably, and despite its importance, it is still not well understood when this approximation holds. The proposed research applies mathematical tools from QIT to address the following question. When does thermalisation happen? The reason why QIT has the potential to solve this problem is that the central mechanism for thermalisation in quantum systems is the growth of entanglement, and entanglement is one of the central subjects of study within QIT. The physics of thermalisation is particularly relevant for nanotechnology, because in the microscopic regime the relative size of thermal effects is large. Hence, harnessing thermal physics could allow for pushing the frontiers of technology at the nano scale. Also, thermalisation is fundamental within the holographic formulation of Quantum Gravity, where certain thermalisation processes in field theory describe the gravitational free fall of a particle towards a black hole and its subsequent evaporation. A complete understanding of this process could provide an answer to the famous black-hole information paradox, formulated by Hawking in 1976. Another goal of the proposed research is to simplify the construction of some of the building blocks of quantum computers. These building blocks are devices that scramble quantum information as much as it is allowed by the laws of quantum mechanics. This scrambling operation is required in many quantum applications, and can be seen as a sort of artificial thermalisation. Comparing artificial and natural processes of thermalisation is a very innovative approach that will allow to quantify the "amount of scrambling" that is present in a given system, in a manner that is relevant to QIT applications like quantum computation.