Solar sailing is a novel concept for spacecraft propulsion where light pressure, rather than reaction mass, is used to generate a propulsive force. This talk will explore the diverse range of unique mission applications which are enabled by solar sailing. In particular, recent mission studies and technology development activities in both Europe and the US will be discussed.

Fibre fabrication and post processing methods have advanced significantly over recent years allowing the development of a host of complex micro-structured fibres and functional fibre devices. These methods have greatly enhanced the functionality and versatility of fibre technology. In this talk I will review progress in three key fibre micro-processing areas.
Firstly, I will describe developments in the fabrication of fibre Bragg gratings that now allow the fabrication of gratings with almost arbitrarily complex phase and amplitude responses. The use of such 'designer' gratings in a variety of applications, including pulse-shaping, OCDMA encoding/decoding, chirped pulse amplification and nonlinear optical switching, is then described.
Secondly, I shall present our latest results in the area of holey fibre fabrication. Holey fibres are complex, air:glass wave-guide structures with strong 2D transverse refractive index profiling. Such fibres have a range of unique optical properties including the possibility of single mode operation at all wavelengths, large/small mode-areas and anomalous dispersion over extended wavelength ranges. Use of the technology in applications such as continuum generation and atom-optics will then be described.
Finally, I review recent results in the area of poled, quasi-phase matched optical fibres in which the induced second-order optical nonlinearity of a fibre is periodically reversed to phase match a specific nonlinear process. SHG conversion efficiencies approaching 30% have now been achieved using fibre pump sources opening the possibility for a range of all-fibre parametric devices.

GaN and its family of III-V wide bandgap semiconductors have proved to be of enormous technological importance of late, due to a wide range of applications in opto-electronics and high-power electronics. For example their use in LED and laser emitters for displays and mass storage, as well as in the production of high power, high frequency FETs. These materials have strong excitonic features and large LO-phonon energies. Such stability against thermal dissociation means that optical non-linearities based on excitonic features are accessible at room temperature. I shall concentrate in my talk on experiments that have been conducted recently at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and in Oxford on the time-resolved optical properties of excitons and free carriers in GaN. A variety of time-resolved techniques have been employed including pump-probe and time-resolved luminescence spectroscopy.

As undergraduates we learn in solid state physics about the physics of infinite perfect crystals. Unfortunately, real solids are neither infinite nor perfect. Disorder represents an important aspect of the physics of real materials, which can have a profound effect on their behaviour.

I will review our current understanding of the physics of such systems with emphasis on those aspects which are as yet not understood, such as the role of interactions and the behaviour of 2 dimensional systems.

Mathematically, the theory is that of waves in a disordered medium, which can equally well be applied to other wave problems, such as in optics or acoustics. There are however some important differences as well as similarities.

I aim to give a brief outline of the role of the EPSRC, followed by details of schemes operated for PhD Students, PDRAs, Fellows, newly appointed academics and the wider research community. I will also outline a number of current issues of interest, including the outcome of the recent EPSRC Photonics Review and the Operation of Peer review.

The discovery of high temperature superconductivity in 1986 led to considerable worldwide effort to develop thin-film Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) that operated in liquid nitrogen at 77K. It was expected that there would be many potential applications in biomagnetism, nondestructive evaluation and geophysics, but it soon became clear that the performance of early devices was inadequate partcularly at low frequencies. Despite this, some dedicated groups have persevered and made steady improvements in film growth, Josephson Junction technology, SQUID design and instrumentation, so that today most of the early problems have been solved. This talk will highlight some of these recent developments (at Strathclyde and elsewhere) and review the prospects for device applications in the future.

To describe the mechanical effects of radiation on a collection of atoms, the Hamiltonian needs to account properly for the gross-motion degrees of freedom of the system. We show how this may be achieved in a manner which is fully consistent with the canonical procedure of quantisation. The formalism underlines the importance of distinguishing between canonical and mechanical momenta, and reveals an additional interaction whose origin is the classical Rontgen current.

The Nobel prize in Physics 1997 was awarded to laser cooling and trapping of atomic gases into the microkelvin regime. These studies concerned alkali atoms such as rubidium, cesium and sodium. These atoms are easy to work with and provide straightforward laser excitation from the atomic ground state to the D-lines. A major breakthrough, in 1995, was the observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) in dense gases of rubidium and sodium atoms (cesium up to now has not yet been Bose-condensed). This was achieved combining techniques of laser cooling, magnetostatic trapping and cooling by forced evaporation of 'hot' atoms.

In Amsterdam we work on cooling and trapping of triplet helium atoms, with BEC as one of the major goals. Triplet helium atoms are in a metastable state with a lifetime of 8000 seconds, which is infinite for most atomic physics purposes. In the colloquium I will elaborate on the physics of cooling and trapping of these atoms. I will discuss the prospects of BEC in triplet helium and show the present status of the our experiments.

Modern-day weather forecasts rely on the latest supercomputers, satellites and an observational network which spans the globe. But just how accurate is the forecast and why do they still 'go wrong' ?! What about the added complications of global warming and El Nino and what will Scotland's weather be like by the turn of the next century ? Heather Reid hopes to address some of these issues and provide an insight into the trials and tribulations of weather forecasting for the media.

Biography
Heather Reid was born in Paisley and attended Edinburgh University where she obtained an honours degree in physics. Heather then studied for a Masters degree in Edinburgh's Meteorology department and joined the Met Office in 1993. After a spell in research she transfered to the forecast division and became BBC Scotland's weather forecaster in 1994. Heather regularly contributes to science festivals, university events and seminars across Scotland. She is Chairperson of the Institute of Physics, Scottish Branch, a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and a Member of the Scottish Centre Committee.