School of Physics & Astronomy

Join us as we chat with Dr Robert Bennett, a new lecturer in the Quantum Theory group, who started working at The School of Physics and Astronomy in April 2020.

• Can you tell us a little about your career up to this point?

I got my PhD at the University of Sussex in 2013, studying the change that a surface (such as a mirror) induces in the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. After this I went to the University of Leeds on an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship for two years, working on various quantum optics problems (Casimir forces, open quantum systems). I then made an international move to the University of Freiburg, Germany, where I took up a post-doctoral fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I ended up staying in Germany for four years, working on a wide range of projects (atom-surface interactions, condensates of light, resonant energy transfer, interatomic Coulombic decay, and more) in the macroscopic quantum electrodynamics group headed by Stefan Buhmann. Finally, in early 2020 I made the move to Glasgow as a Lecturer in the Quantum Theory group. 

•  What are you working on at the moment and what does your work involve?

At the moment I am working on inverse design of photonic structures, which essentially means deciding what qualities I would like a specific device to have (coherence, fidelity, energy transport efficiency) and then letting an efficient algorithm design an appropriate structure. This works well because the best structures for shaping light are not always those which are the most intuitive, instead being messy, almost ‘organic’-looking structures. My work involves a mixture of pen-and-paper calculations and FDTD simulations done in Python. 

• What challenges did you face in launching your career?

Probably the main challenge was working in a relatively niche area, which means it is often hard work to convince people that what I do is important. The best way to get past this was to emphasise the hidden links between my work and that of others. 

• What advice would you give to students and alumni interested in breaking into your industry?

Find a problem that interests you (and isn’t completely insane), and then work at it until you get results you didn’t expect. 

• What is your favourite part about your job?

The freedom to study problems that interest me (at least when I have time), and finding new and interesting ways to explain difficult concepts. 

• Tell us something no one knows about your job!

Working in a mathematical subject means you end up knowing a lot more about typesetting than you might have expected…

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First published: 24 August 2020