Courses & outreach

A sixteen-week tutorial course delivered as a series of thirty-minute lectures in the group’s weekly seminar.

The course runs in two parts. The first covers the neuromorphic paradigm itself — the energy cost of separating memory from processing, leaky integrate-and-fire and Hodgkin–Huxley neuron models, spike-timing-dependent plasticity, the memristor and its pinched hysteresis loop, crossbar arrays for in-memory computing, spiking neural networks in hardware, and reservoir computing.

The second turns to the materials. Atomic and electronic structure of oxides, defect chemistry and oxygen vacancies, valence-change memory in HfO₂, Ta₂O₅ and TiO₂, electrochemical metallization, and the Mott transition in VO₂ and NbO₂ — the “Mott memristor” as a neuristor. It closes on electrical characterization and the figures of merit that decide whether a device is viable: endurance, retention, linearity and variability.

Assessment is 40% the weekly seminar lectures, 30% a mid-semester written review, and 30% a final project presented to the group.

A tutorial course on the coupling between light and magnetic order, prepared and delivered in the group’s weekly seminar.

It builds from magnetization dynamics — what precession conserves, and what it cannot on its own explain — toward the magneto-optical effects used to read magnetic state with light, and the regime where magnons and photons hybridise.

A tutorial course on topological ideas in photonics, prepared and delivered in the group’s weekly seminar.

Sessions work through why a gapped bulk can still conduct at its edges: what a Chern number counts, why an invariant cannot change across an interface without the gap closing, and how a jump in that invariant fixes the number and chirality of the edge modes that must appear.

Modern Physics is the bridge between the classical mechanics and electromagnetism of the first years and the quantum description of matter used throughout the rest of the degree.

The textbook for the course is available above, and lecture slides are posted here as the semester progresses.

The World Pendulum Alliance connects remotely operated pendulums across several countries, letting students measure the local acceleration of gravity from anywhere and compare results across latitudes.

Related publication: Fernandes et al., Tidal local gravity effects measured by remote controlled pendulums, 2022 8th International Engineering, Sciences and Technology Conference (IESTEC), 790–795.