Speaker Information
Prof. Giles Hammond
Invited Speaker
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
Giles Hammond obtained his PhD from the University of Birmingham in 1998, developing a superconducting torsion balance to search for violations of the equivalence principle and perform precision measurements of the Casimir force. He then spent two years at JILA, University of Colorado at Boulder, building inertial seismic isolation systems for the advanced LIGO gravitational wave upgrade, before returning to Birmingham for a further 7 years. During his 2nd position at Birmingham he placed new limits on forces coupling mass to spin, putatively mediated by axions.
In 2007 Giles moved to Glasgow to take up a RCUK academic fellowship within the Institute for Gravitational Research. Promoted to Reader in 2011 and professor in 2016, Giles works on the development of ultralow thermal noise suspensions operating at both room temperature and cryogenic temperature. He led the development, installation and characterisation of the fused silica suspension systems in the Hanford and Livingston gravitational wave detectors for the aLIGO upgrade. These detectors made the first detection of gravitational waves from a black hole binary system on 14th September 2015, opening up the gravitational window on the Universe.
He also leads a group focussed on the development of ultra-sensitive MEMS gravimeters. These temperature stabilised devices offer a new transformative technology with industrial spin-offs in the fields of oil & gas prospecting, environmental monitoring and defence. The work is funded under the National Quantum Technology programme, and is being developed into a spinout company. An array of these gravimeters is currently being prepared for installation on Mt Etna, as the worlds first MEMS gravimeter array for volcano monitoring.
He currently chairs the LIGO Scientific Collaboration Suspension & Isolation Working group, the Institute of Physics Scotland national branch, and is a fellow of the IoP and Royal Society of Edinburgh.
