Yes.
Yeah, we think one more speaker. Maybe if I move on to mute now.
That's case.
God bless.
Yeah, so as you can see.
Okay, I hope people in Zoom can hear me.
Welcome! We have one more speaker, Mark, who is not here, uh, yet, but.
Since he's… he's going to go last. Uh, I think we can get started.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to what might be the only event this Christmas where you get.
festive cheers, cookies. And macroscopic quantum tunneling.
Uh, this afternoon's theme is the Christmas Feast of Science, and like any good feast, we are celebrating the finest ingredients.
curiosity, discovery, brilliance, failure. Persistence, and most importantly, the instrument that costs millions run on nanometer precision and still needs to be switched off and on again sometimes.
Uh, on the surface, today might sound like a Nobel Prize event, but really, this is all about finding a good excuse to celebrate.
the work we do here. And just as importantly, to remind ourselves to actually notice it once in a while.
And while the Nobel Medals may be minted in Stockholm.
The journey to those discoveries often run through places just like this one.
Where, as Rutherford neatly put it, we are really just here to find things out.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine this year celebrates the discovery of regulatory T cells.
Uh, the cells that teach our immune system the difference between what to fight and what to protect.
That discovery began. Back in the late 1990s, as pure.
Curiosity-driven biology. Answering a question that had puzzled immunologist for decades. Why doesn't our immune system.
attack us all the time. Now, following this discovery, what connects this directly to Harvel is.
That understanding immune regulation at this level now depends critically on the biophysics.
structure, imagining, and quantitative methods. Exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary science happening here every day.
So this year's Madison Noble Prize isn't just a story about cells.
It's a story about how physics, biology, and technology come together to reveal life's most delicate control systems.
Similarly. For the lower price in physics this year.
We celebrate the moment when quantum mechanics truly stepped into electrical circuits.
When tunneling, decoherence, and fragile quantum states stopped being thought experiments.
And became engineering challenges. And moments like that never belong to a single lab or a single experiment.
They rest on decades of quite theoretical work on understanding how quantum systems lose information.
How measurement disturbs what it observes. And how control might one day stabilize.
What major constantly tries to destroy? Which makes it especially fitting that we have one of the people who helped build that intellectual framework.
right here in the audience today, and there's Professor Gerard.
Milburn. Uh, through his work on quantum measurement, decoherence and control, he helped shape how an entire generation of physicists.
think about keeping quantum systems, including superconducting circuits, alive long enough to be useful.
But I won't single him out. too dramatically here.
Another example in the chemistry is the Nobel Prize is the celebrating the metal organic frameworks, the MOFs.
The remarkable porous materials that can trap gases, separate chemicals, store energy, and more.
But here's the part that belongs to this campus.
Back in 2008. One of the very first user experiments on the I-19 beam line at Diamond was the MOF study.
In other words, while the world was still learning what MOFs were, this campus was already helping to figure out how they actually behave.
How the ports open, how the frameworks breathe, how gases move inside them.
And that's not just the headline-driving work. But without it, the headlines wouldn't have happened.
It's a quiet reminder that the distance between Stockholm and this room is sometimes much shorter as it appears.
So, this event is the celebration of everyone who quietly makes these breakthroughs possible, and.
Since my poster announcement. successfully tricked you into believing that this is some kind of a Christmas event.
I should also address that elephant in the room.
that, yes, I did try to arrange for the mulled wine.
But apparently, when you work at a world-leading national laboratory, the rules are uncertainty is allowed in the measurements.
And not in the refreshments. So instead, we have gone for the advanced scientific alternative, and that is tea, coffee, and experimentally verified festive cookies.
Uh, so today is more than a lecture, it's a symphony of scientific achievements, where each of you play an essential instrument, and with that, let's meet our superstar soloists. We have.
Our first speaker, Professor Dave Scott. He will be giving the… talk on the physiology and medicine part. So, Dave is a bio… Physicist who works across a remarkable range of disciplines, including immunology.
Bacteriology, cancer studies, and structural biology. A graduate of University of Leeds, he has worked at York, Oxford, Bristol Universities before moving to the University of Nottingham, where he now teaches and researches in.
biotechnology. He works closely with the research complex at Harwell.
With the biophysical Methods group on projects spanning the innate immune system, antimicrobial resistance, and viral infections.
Today, Dave connects the Nobel Prize in Physiology. And medicine to the real molecular machinery of immunity.
And how we explore it right here at Harwell.
Please, uh, welcome Professor Dave.
Now, in addition to that, I would also like to.
Introduce two other speakers, and then we have back-to-back talk for the three talks, and we'll take the questions at the end.
So, our second speaker. Uh, Dr. Jonathan Burnett.
Uh, he is the Deputy Director of Research and member of the NQCC leadership team. Jonathan completed his MSc in physics at Royal Holloway, University of London.
And his PhD in decoherence and superconducting circuits at RHUL and National Physical Laboratory.
Most recently at Oxford Quantum Circuits, Jonathan served as head of quantum hardware, lead of quantum systems, and director of hardware engineering.
He is passionate about taking quantum technology out of the lab and into the real world.
applications that deliver societal benefits, making him the perfect guide to this year's Nobel Prize story.
So please welcome Jonathan Barnett.
And then we have a third speaker, Dr. Mark Warren. He has not raised here yet, but let me still.
Maybe, perhaps I can wait for his introduction when he comes here, so we can start with Dave first, and then we'll move on to physics, and then chemistry.
So, please, yeah. Thank you.
There's the… Hello, I can just use.
Thank you. And, uh, to my own encounter of autonomy… Yeah, just my own encounter of autoimmunity.
I have to do this from a seating position.
In response, yeah.
There we are.
I think this is a test, I hope.
I only touch the microphone. Right. Brilliant, thank you, and thank you very much for the invite, uh, for talking.
If you click on this base settings. Right.
I should be…
Yeah.
That's fine, I love it. Okay, thank you very much, and thank you for the invite. Uh, it's a great pleasure to present this research for the 2025 Nobel Prize.
In physiology or medicine. Uh, because this is one of those.
years when it's absolutely fundamental. piece of science with great significance has been rewarded.
And rightly so. So, the three laureates are Mary Bruncow, Fred Ramsdell.
and Shimon Sagoguchi, and. They were given the prize for… Discoveries concerning the peripheral immune tolerance, and of course, at this point, if you're not a biologist, you'll go, ooh.
In fact, if you are a biologist, you also go.
That's all sounding incredibly complex. And the answer is, yes, it is.
Um, and I'm hoping to actually unpack some of these terms in the initial part of the lecture, so… Anybody can understand what's going on here.
Uh, and actually what the significance of this, and what the general applicability of all these are. So.
The immune system made simple. Now… Back in the day, when I started doing bits and pieces on the immune system, I worked on.
If you can sort of see around. That sort of bottom left-hand corner.
Um, stuff to do with, uh, what's called the innate immune system.
And you'll be very familiar with the innate immune system. It's basically what gives you lots of snot.
Uh, when you get a cold, it's your first defense to get everything against some kind of infection.
You've got sort of inflammation going on. It's a very generalized response.
Okay, and it's keeping you safe. And… and lastly, I started to work also with some antibodies, which are in the bottom right-hand corner.
Which is to do with what's called the adaptive immune system.
Which is, when you get some kind of infection.
Your body adapts to it and then remembers the infection.
What that thing was. So the next time it encounters it.
It can then mount a quicker response. Which, of course, is the purpose of getting yourself vaccinated, by the way.
Um, and I shouldn't have to say, go and get yourself vaccinated.
Uh, but we seem to be living in a world where that is… that has to be reiterated all the time.
And then, in the top right-hand corner, we have the T cells.
And… broadly speaking, this adaptive immune system is split into B cells.
the T cells. Both of these are from cells called lymphocytes.
And the B cells are called back because they mature.
In the bone, and the T cells mature in the thymus, which is a little gland somewhere around here.
Um, which, if you remove it, as we'll find out, or do anything to it, has severe consequences for you.
And when I was starting out in, sort of, science, there were PhD students who were working on T cells.
And you can spot them a mile off, because they have that 1,000-yard stare.
of somebody who's doing something very difficult, very complicated, and never really worked very well.
And one of the reasons for that was a huge amount in the field.
of confusion of what was going on, of competing theories, of bits and pieces of knowledge which weren't actually being able to be put together in some coherent network.
And one of the beauties of this year's Nobel Prize is it really has cut through.
a lot of that, which is great for future PhD students.
But also great for us because we now understand things a lot better. So.
T cells… Um, essentially recognize.
what's called APCs, which are antigen preventing cells in the body, and these are cells which have encountered some kind of pathogen.
Um… swallowed it up, and taking bits to pieces, and displayed it on the outside of the cell.
Also, they actually look at… they can actually see the infected cell itself.
Especially if you've got a viral or bacterial infection.
And then it binds to it through T cell receptors.
And through various checking mechanisms, it says, okay, go, we have a… we have a foreign body here, let's get rid of it, and it clears it from the system.
Now, the thing is, of course. That's unique thing there.
Buys a unique T cell receptor there. So you have, like, a lock and key mechanism. So you have some kind of.
maturation process going on. So you have these naive T cells, which are then matured.
Into things, into cells that can then produce… that actually recognizes things. And you get 3.
Broad cells here. T cells, so this is your.
systems, and for those who are wondering, anything to do with allergies tends to be around here.
I say that's just hate the sufferer. Uh, and you have… what's called helper T cells, which are essentially the generals of the system.
Look, there's something here that's, you know. do something about it. The cytotoxic T cells, the killer T cells, the assassins.
which finds… bind to the thing and then kill it.
But also, the memory T cells, which are the historians of the system.
So they're the ones that remember the challenge, so the next time you get it.
You can, um… You can, um, encounter… your system will respond a lot faster.
And again, purpose of vaccination. Which also is the reason why.
Every year, we have to have a new flu jab, because the.
antigen changes. And so, you have to get a new strain in there, and why you keep getting recurring colds? Because the cold rhinovirus mutates a lot.
So they're debates the system. But he has other things that you have.
So you have vaccinations for other things, which then, when you get encountered.
just goes away. And I'm of an age, um, where, as a small child, I had mumps.
And it really hurts. Um, and it was very common to have mumps.
And measles in school in the early 70s. don't have that now. Well, as long as you get your kids vaccinated.
Now, in all of this. The question then becomes, okay, so this is like the response system.
So what's happening here. So why do… why is this… what's happening when things go wrong?
Because it's well known that you could… the body can attack itself. It misrecognizes things.
So they must, at some level. be a system that's… stops the body going too far.
Or recognizes when things have been. mistaken.
So there must be some kind of checkpoint. And this was thought to be what's called central tolerance in the thymus, that it basically, as the T cells matured.
Each was tested. Against the various things, and those that were found to be self-recognizing, I recognized the body.
were taken out of the system. And that was thought to be the thing, but there was a few things out there that didn't quite explain things over the years, so this led to an idea that might be something else there, a peripheral tolerance, an extra layer.
Of regulation. And so, what was proposed was called suppressor T cells.
Which were things that came in. Okay, this thing has recognized the wrong thing.
I come in and make sure that this doesn't happen.
And this… Unfortunately, led to a lot of confusion in the field.
Because A, the techniques weren't good enough. to find these cells.
And we're talking these ideas from the 60s and 70s here.
Um, and B, a lot of the… unfortunately, a lot of the studies out there were later found to be technically.
Not up to it, okay? So, suppressor T cells, as an idea in the field.
fell away from the consensus. It was something that you really, really should look at.
Because, you know, it's been looked at before. And, you know, it was a mess.
It's a complete mess. And so, Sakaguchi.
came on the sea. And he… And colleagues had done… colleagues, and then he had done quite an interesting experiment.
And this is one of those little niggly things that we often do as scientists. You think.
There's an experiment I did. Concord explained, but yes, something out there.
So what he did, he took a newborn mouse, and if you remove its thymus.
Right? It then has an overactive immune system, and the mouse gets sick.
If you add. mature cells from a… sorry, cells from a more mature mouse.
Back into there. It then becomes healthy again. So there was something in those mix of T cells.
It was meant that they were not. that was suppressing the effects.
of these autoimmune reactions. And… this… One of their many ideas that lets suppresses T cells, but this idea wouldn't go away.
Okay, thinking about it, thinking about it, and there were various… and it wasn't really until the 80s and 90s where the methods were developed.
Where you could actually look at. what's on our surface of the T cells and separate, and crucially, then separate out the different types.
Now, T cells carry a receptacle CD4. Um, but there were some which had a receptacle CD25.
And he was able to separate out. from the pool of T cells, the CD25 ones.
did the same experiments. And this time, just adding in CD4 cells.
The mouse still got sick. But if you added this once with CD25.
The mouse became healthy again. And these cells didn't mature in the thymus, but matured elsewhere, hence.
peripheral immune system. So this was a crucial.
Things that he'd found. regulatory T cells, things that were regulating.
T cell response. So that was 1995, that's a big, crucial.
piece of evidence, and well on the way to eventually winning the Nobel Prize, but to convince the field.
It took a lot longer. Now here, we next move on to our other two laureates, Mary Bruncout and Fred Bramsdall.
They're working in a biotech company out in the States.
And they were looking at a particular gene. associated with a particular type of mouse.
And at the time, um… The only place they could do their experiments.
And I had a sink big enough was the janitor's closet, so most of his Nobel Prize-winning time was done in a space that used to have all the mops and buckets in.
Simply because the sink was big enough so you could wash the cages out in.
And I think as scientists, we've all been adaptive over the years, but not… probably not quite that adaptive.
And the mouse they looked at was the scurfy mouse mice. Now, back in the day.
Um, when also perhaps ethics were perhaps a little looser, when they had the Manhattan Project, which was built.
Here, it's an old picture of Oak Ridge Laboratories.
Uh, they used to, um, look at the effects of radiation.
on animals. So, quite often, they would go to these test sites for the nuclear… the atomic bombs.
and place mouse cages at certain distances. And watch… and take these irradiated mice and look for mutations.
And one of them was the Skirki mutation, which.
is a mouse that's. basically lives maybe only 3 weeks.
and has huge autoimmune responses, so when you want to look at autoimmune responses.
You had a model there. So before, you knocked out the thymus and looked at things.
Here, you've got something that's already got an autoimmune thing, so there must be something in its genetics that's saying… that's giving this autoimmune response.
And they searched and searched and searched, until they found.
a stretch of 500. thousand base pairs.
And 20 possible different genes that could be in there.
Now, these days, if I wanted to sequence 500,000 base pairs, I'd send the DNA off to Source Bioscience.
tell them to do some nanopore sequencing and get cross if it's not in my inbox the next morning.
This was the 90s, okay? It was by hand. You read sequences of 800 to 1,000 base pairs.
Uh, it's a long job to get to that point, which is why it took them a long time.
And then they had 20 candidate genes. which they ranked, uh, according to one to which they could then knock out and investigate the effects.
And as Professor Ramsdol, um, admitted. Uh, the one they eventually got to, FOXP3.
was the last one, it was number 20. Because when they took their educated guesses on the functions of all these things.
This one, I think, meh, but it's on there, so let's do it.
And… they found that FOX3P, sorry, P3, was associated with.
these autoimmune responses. In mice and what is it? Well, it's a transcription factor.
Which means it binds DNA to do stuff. It's part… it's a master controller.
of gene expression. You have this in, and it controls the expression of certain genes.
If you knock it out, it has mutations in, and you knock it out.
then you have. you don't control the genes, you don't get that response.
It's like, um, coming to this lecture theater wanting to switch on the lights, and somebody's knocked out the light switch.
Okay. And what they then found… Next, was to look for the human.
homologue of this, where it occurs in humans, and there was a particular disease called IPEX.
Which is immune dysregulation polyendocropathy. Enteropathy, excellent, and please, please be, yes, that took absolutely ages to try and pronounce properly.
Because all these medical terms, yeah, but basically what it means is you have an overactive immune system.
You have some kind of autoimmune system which is attacking, in this case, the endocrine glands.
And you have some sort of. Um, effects, which in this case is severe.
Persistent diarrhea, malabsorption, and gut things, and it's X-linked. So I'm carrying the X chromosome.
So it affects males. Okay, because obviously females have two X chromosomes, and one is compensated, you only have one if you're a male.
And as these children didn't live particularly long, the chances of them being.
a male child carrier. And passing those genes on to females is very, very low indeed.
Now, this also linked it to other diseases, such as type 1 diabetes, which is also an autoimmune disease, and as I'm sitting down at the moment.
arthritis as well. So, there are… suddenly there was this key link.
Between Fox. P3… and autoimmunity.
So where do we go from there? Well. Sakaguchi did the next experiment, which was.
What is the effects of FOX3P? Posure P3 on the.
Um, T-Rex on these, these, um, regulatory T cells.
And so we taught what's called the naive T cell, which is something that hasn't been there.
And then inserted a gene for FOXP3. And it became a regulatory T cell.
So you usurp the master controller into your T cell.
And it becomes one of these. So this showed.
Not only that you had. a gene for this.
that this gene controlled everything, and also that this.
The effects of that was to produce this regulatory T cells.
which are part of this new peripheral immune system, which explained so much about why.
your systems don't consume you, but actually are well regulated, so it is absolutely extra level of regulation there.
And this cut through a lot of what was in the field.
The misapprehensions that had gone on previously, and really, really tidied things up.
Massively. So what's the significance of this? Well.
It's a basic biology to medicine story. Okay, it's not just an DTM insight to the biology.
It has broad, broad implications out there. It explains… why we don't develop autoimmune disease.
diseases, and it clarifies. Why these diseases happen when regulation fails.
So, it really… it had… when you think back to that diagram of the immune system.
Right? Start to explain a whole host of those interactions, and why things occur, and why.
Certainly things just happen in the clinic. So what is the clinical impact of this?
And the clinical impact is very, very large. It opens the door to basically lots of therapeutic interactions, so if you can manipulate these T cells, you can prevent autoimmune disease.
Practically, what does that mean? Well, it's not just tolerance to things like transplanted organs.
It also means a cure for type 1 diabetes.
And having a son who's type 1 diabetic, who's on a, you know, an insulin pump and a little regulator.
That's a really, really good thing. The other thing is its role in cancer therapy.
Now, all those T cells are monitoring your body all the time, and what the thing that monitor is whether cells.
start to proliferate too much. I form tumors. It has been noticed that in cancer cells, and especially persistent.
Cancer, prolific cancers. But T regs are up-regulated.
So, essentially, they are suppressing the effect. Of the immune system trying to clear the tumour.
So, there is a huge amount of interest. In how you can regulate Tregs themselves and their levels as part of immunotherapy.
I'm starting to look at cancer cells. Cancers that are far more tricky and difficult to.
Um, to look at. So, you know, pancreatic, stomach, lung, brain, etc.
things that are, you know. Not quite death sentences, but, you know, unfortunately near as damaging as that is.
This has also led to about 200. Ongoing clinical trials.
Here, uh, going… looking at all the different types of… these different types of autoimmune diseases.
transplantation and cancer as well. So he says, not only explain basic biology, he's exploded the whole area of biotech.
As well. There are challenges with that.
Obviously, you have an oversuppression risk. Here, okay, you've suppressed your Tregs response.
Does that mean that instead of cancer, you're going to an autoimmune reaction?
Okay, how do you do that? Targeting specificity, you still have that problem trying to find the right thing.
Right? The thing about tumor cells is they are self-cells, okay?
Um, just gone wrong. And again, the long-term safety implications of these as well, because it's very new.
how we fit all those things together as well, again, is… A little unknown.
But, you can see how having a very, very key discovery.
Here, has led to. These, uh, clearing up the field, which is a good thing.
As I said, uh, you know. I didn't really get into T cells, and for many years didn't want to touch them, because it was a collage and complicated field.
You have to be in the know, you had to do it, you know, sort of from PhD student up, was to really understand the literature.
Right? This discovery has really, really. toned up that whole field.
Massively, which has been really nice. Um… So… concluding, really.
The… the prize. reflects really a fun… something of lasting fundamental importance.
It's very hard, even when the Nobel Prize, to say, oh, this one's one that will last forever. But here we've got something.
that is really, really key. Right? It's by the tenacity.
of a few people to think… to wondering experience. Sakaguchi wondering, sort of, well, I've got this experiment.
And it's not explained by the standard things. Now.
Thing is that he wasn't massively in, you know, sort of, he was in the field, but sort of not a massive star of the field when he was starting to do this, which basically means he was a scientist like the rest of us.
So, you know, do you have an experiment sitting in your back pocket, thinking, I've all got this data? Never quite explained it.
Sometimes, it's just rethinking others. Sometimes it's going to be completely wrong because the experiment was complete rubbish.
But as scientists, it's determining between those two options is really key for moving things forward.
The other thing is the real world implications as well.
But, uh, the other two laureates were able to see.
wants not only to do the basic science, but how to apply it.
As well. And it starts the… that closing that circle.
of, um, of fundamentals of science and. and applied, which is important, because actually.
If you've been doing sites for some time. You know, all fundamental sciences applied, it just hasn't been applied yet, and all applied science is basically fundamental science wearing a different hat.
So, you know, and some of the best science goes on in biotechs.
And, uh, and some… and some of the most applied stuff comes out of, um.
something that was quite fundamental from a university lab.
So all these things are connected together, and this is really what this prize.
price is honouring. So, I think I'm coming up to about 20, 30 minutes.
So, uh, I think I'll leave it there, and thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Dave. Meanwhile, we start… set up our next speaker. If you have one quick question, which can't wait, then please fire up.
Oh, got away with it. Oh! Um, Dick?
regulatory T cells could be manipulated to. recognize self-sells such as cancer cells, more or less.
is you also use it to recognise old cells that have gone wrong in… well, not sell, rather, but proteins and prions.
Oh, that's the good thing. Now, they tend… things that are soluble, like proteins and prions in the system, um, tend to be sort of more the antibody.
Antibodies sort of response as well. Um… It might recognize the cell that is infected or producing that, which would be quite interesting as well.
Um, and I think that'll be quite an interesting thing, yes.
Hmm, yeah, interesting.
Okay, so then we have our next talk, uh, Jonathan, please.
Which is good. The right one is the next.
Should I book. No, sir, then, okay, maybe we use this. No.
Emmanuel. Yeah, okay. Uh, alright, um, yeah, so just start, I think, just by thanking and acknowledging, uh, yeah, Bruce. So if it wasn't… Uh, for him putting this together, we wouldn't have the platform.
Where we then get to celebrate some amazing achievements and come out this year. So just to really thank Bruce for.
Uh, that opportunity. And here, so then moving on to Nobel Prize in Physics, um… So let me, uh, kind of set the scene a little bit here.
Uh, so the price of physics, this one, so we've gone for, um.
the discovery of macroscopic quantum tunnelling. And energy quantization in an electric circuit. So, okay, we will break that apart in the slides to come.
Uh, on the left-hand side, you've got John Koch.
at the time of this experiment. He was the PI, so it's the professor, this is taking place inside of his lab.
In the middle, we've got Michelle Devry. At the time of this experiment, he's the postdoc in that lab.
And then on the right-hand side, we've got John Martinez, and at the time of this, he's the PhD student. So, quite different to what Dave was describing of.
work that came from different areas. This is all consolidated in one lab, a run of experiments that happen sequential to one another.
Um, all three of these are… really considered, kind of, titans within the field of now what you would call condensed, uh, sort of.
you know, quantum devices might be how you might frame it?
Um, at the time of this, quantum devices didn't exist. This is the paper that made that.
Uh, possible to sort of be at home field.
Uh, they've each all won many, many awards, and of course now the Nobel Prize is the biggest of those.
Um, and then just to finally comment, so John Clark, uh, his whole career was.
Effectively, uh, at UC Berkeley. Um, Michelle Devry, after doing this post-op, he had a permanent role at Seclay.
Um, and then also a professorship at Yale before now moving to, uh, UC Santa Barbara and Google, where he currently is.
And then John Martinez, uh, after finishing his PhD here.
He went on to a postdoc in Supply, then a staff scientist role at NIST before getting.
Uh, professorship position at UC Santa Barbara, then going on to working at Google, and then finally now his, um.
CTO and co-founder at the company Kola. Uh, what this is not is a prize in the direction of Super Nuts and Cubits.
Make that one really, really clear. This is about quantum physics to begin with.
So, uh, the paper itself. Uh, the one that's often cited is this one on the right-hand side.
Uh, so then if you read that title, you've got measurements of macroscopic quantum tunnelling.
So, because some of the words that. are above, or there. What you'll notice is the energy quantization bit, that's not on this paper.
And the reason for that is, if you look on the left-hand side, there's a second paper that also went into this volume of PRL.
That's where the energy quantization was. And then when I mentioned that it's a run of papers.
In actual facts, from 1984, and then going through to 1988, you'll see there's several papers that sort of further described, um, this sequence of experiments.
So, what we'll walk through is some of the physics to kind of break this down and give us the language to walk through that experiment.
Then walk through the key results of it. Um, before getting the, kind of, what followed, and then some perspectives on, uh, you know, quantum computing in the UK.
And all of this is really going to be driving you that second bullet point, which is.
when might we expect quantum behavior? Well, this is the fundamental question that the experiment was looking at.
So, let's start with some cartoons. Um, so on the left-hand side, we've got a cartoon of.
There's a person, this person is trying to get a particle, so that's the sort of silver ball on the side.
up and over some kind of barrier, the barrier being a hill.
And in order to do that, you know, classically, so in the welders we typically all experience.
Um, in that one, you have to have the energy to take it up and over the hill, so the red arrow there.
And what you can do is represent that with an energy diagram on the right-hand side.
That energy diagram is now saying. My particle, so the silver bull, that's got an energy given by the capital E.
And then that's encountering my barrier. My barrier's now got that energy U0, so the hill now is represented by this square.
A red block on the right-hand side. And unless I've got energy E that's above that.
classically, I'm not able to get to the other side.
And so we consider that a classically forbidden region.
If we look on the left-hand side at the lower part of that.
What you've got is what looks like a tunnel.
And so, in this year, so 2025, this is the International Euro Quantum.
This is then recognizing that 100 years ago, quantum mechanics was kind of formalized.
Within quantum mechanics, it's possible for something to tunnel.
Then tumbling showed on that cartoon, so not going via the red curved arrow, instead going by the orange.
across arrow. And then on our energy diagram, uh, so all you can see is having the idea of, um.
A particle represented by this wave function, that's the oscillation you've got on the side.
It encounters the same barrier, so the dashed lines that are from the top is just saying that barrier repeats.
And then in the case, you can see that there's this bit where it stops oscillating and decays.
But on the far side, it still emerges, and then what this is trying to say is.
You've got a finite probability that the particle's able to be on the other side, therefore it has tunneled.
So that's the concept of quantum tunneling. onto when might we expect something to behave in a quantum way. We can then think of wave-particle duality.
So, we could say, okay, a particle, electron is a particle, we know its mass.
Um, but that electron, when it moves, it happens to also attack on a wave-like characteristic. Many experiments, you know, found this.
What you can describe is that from that electron, it has a mass, it has a velocity, that gives it momentum.
Um, that momentum I see in the bottom is MP, and then you see on the right-hand side, about the middle of the screen.
Uh, you can see I get a wavelength lambda given by H. Banks constant divided by that momentum.
And I can apply that to, sort of, two, yeah, side-by-side examples. I say.
What if I plug in the numbers for an electron, so something that's very small and traveling near the speed of light.
I end up with a wavelength that is 10 to the minus 10.
So it's small, but that's a physical wavelength, it's an atomic depth scale.
I could also do this for a cannonball, so if I do it for a cannonball.
I've got something much larger, clearly, uh, you know, like a… it's not a particle anymore.
Um, it won't travel anywhere near as fast, and I end up with a wavelength there that 10 to the minus 36.
So that's such a small dimension, it's not really a physical dimension.
And the way we interpret that is to say, probably a cannonball doesn't behave in a quantum, mechanically driven way.
So you can kind of think of this as giving you an idea of what does or doesn't act as quantum.
What that enables me to do is to start thinking about.
Or when might the system hit that kind of trans… like, that barrier? When might it swap between the two?
And so here, what I could introduce is the concept of a microscopic system.
Versus a macroscopic system. And if you recall in the Nobel Prize, this is for macroscopic quantum tunnelling, so I do need to sort of explain what macroscopic might mean.
So on the left-hand side, we've got microscopic systems, and these are normally things you might think of as atoms, electrons, photons, maybe molecules.
And what you could maybe, kind of. you know, group them together with is this notion that.
You can quantify all of their properties. In other words, you know how many atoms are there.
If they've got a charge, you know what that charge is. If they've got a spin, you know what that spin is.
On the right-hand side, we've now got what I call a macroscopic system.
So this is a engineered thing, it's a circuit that exists.
Don't worry about the fact it's an OB, and don't worry about the shapes or whatever that are here.
The key features to draw out is. It's very fuzzy. It doesn't have defined ends.
You've also got lots of weird spots all over it.
So what that's telling me is, I don't really know where to begin in terms of counting the number of atoms that are present.
I don't really know where to begin in terms of understanding, you know, imperfections, if I've got stuff that isn't the same material.
At best, I'm going to have an order of magnitude estimate of all of those quantities.
So that's how I could kind of make a distinction between something that's microscopic, and I do know them.
versus something macroscopic, order of magnitude, hand-waving estimate is the best that I can get.
That's like a jump, and ask you to just join me on this jump, because I now suddenly say superconductivity, as if that clearly flows from the last slide, and it doesn't really.
But trust me, we'll get to that. So… What is a superconductor? This is something where, at some point, it will conduct electricity in a way that has no resistance.
So, if I start with a non-superconductor. So Copler is a non-superconductor.
I start at higher temperature, so on this diagram, look at the blue line.
If I start at a higher temperature, so the very top part of that blue line.
As I lower the temperature, that resistance will decrease.
That's because I've got some mechanism, probably the lattice vibration's going on.
that I'm reducing, less scattering, less resistance. As I get to very low temperature, so the lowest part of the blue line there.
What happens normally is it doesn't keep decreasing. At some point it will saturate. So I'll see that there's some other physics that appears.
If I compare that to a superconductor, so now the red line.
It does originally the same type of behaviour, so as I start at a high temperature and work down.
Uh, the resistance is decreasing. But when I get to some point, and that's labeled TC, at some point that resistance just drops to zero.
So, you've now got a conductor of electricity with no resistance. It is a supercut.
Uh, very, very old discovery, so 1911. The theory to describe and understand this, though, 40 to 50 years later, so it took quite a while to get onto this.
Here now is the cartoon that in Nobel, uh, you know, the awarding of the prize, they come up with some material to describe this, and this is the cartoon for that.
So at the top, what we're now saying is, my material, so my copper, or my super nutter, is represented by this bar.
And that bar's now got lots of electrons in it. The little white circles, these are just cartoon electrons.
The electrons are jostling, that's what gives us resistance.
In the middle ones of these, what's happened is all of these electrons are suddenly holding hands.
They've all now started to pair up. And so that's describing that when you've become a superconductor, what's happened is your charge carrier has become a Cooper pair.
And a cooper bear is something that doesn't have any resistance.
That cliff appears got another property about it, which is that all of those Cooper pairs are able to be described in a collective way.
So they've all got this description of a wave function that describes what all of them are doing.
That's what the bottom image is now trying to convey, and this idea that.
You've got the same little smiley face at the end.
But it's something that was really long-bodied, because it's just got all of the electrons inside of it. So this is the cartoon they put across.
And what's the final detail to add here is that the middle one and the bottom one.
You'll note that that's not just one bar, it's two separate bars, and then these two separate bars have a gap in the middle.
That gap is what we would call a Joseph's injunction.
And it's a way of describing a situation where you've got a superconductor.
an insulator. Air is an insulator, it's a cap.
And a second soup nut to go next to it. So that gives you a Jose conjunction junction.
And the key thing here is that that collective wave function.
spreads across both, so it's able to go across both sides.
And the theory here, or the kind of really important question that comes out of this.
is that it's not clear that that wave function.
is something that is, you know, there's many, many electrons, you know, many, many, many, many electrons here.
It isn't clear that that is a quantum mechanical variable.
So, if we go back to our title, macroscopic Quantum Tunnelling.
Quantization, electrical circuit. This is something that starts to look like an electrical circuit.
But it isn't clear that you could think of it as a quantum mechanical object.
And it was Tony Leger in 1983 who really was saying, this is something that isn't obvious, this is the, um, theory, like, the question he posed.
And then the work of 85 onwards is the experiment that answered that question.
So to bring you tonight, to go into that superconductivity, gyros conjunction is because it creates a playground that lets us try and explore that question.
So in the bottom left, we've got a circuit diagram. In that circuit diagram, the X represents the Josephson junction otherwise, and you've got a conventional notation.
And the point here is that when this is biased with a current, I have been.
You end up with a dynamic that looks like a particle in a well.
So then now, if we look at the top, um, one of these plots.
You see, there's a little grey particle. That little grey particle.
Goes backwards and forwards in the well at this frequency, omega zero.
And when there's no bias, the energy landscape is just a sinusoid.
So, it's just going back and forth. So, when bias equals zero, that's what's happening.
As I increase my bias current, I start to introduce some tilting.
For this, so then as we go from the top to the middle.
And that tilting, the effects of that is it means.
The potential on one side of this, um… you know, so I've got my particle going on one side of that well.
I've got this potential delta U. That's got smaller. And then I can keep increasing that current.
And so I get to such a point as the bottom scenario.
And in the bottom scenario, that delta U, that potential has become zero.
The particles no longer bound, it just starts to slide away, run away.
So this gives us a situation where we're able to start to do an interesting experiment.
So what we can have is a situation where we've got… we start in the middle here.
This adjustment junction, we're looking at what's called the transport characteristics, it's IRV.
start in the middle, so at zero current, I see zero voltage, this is superconductor.
As I increase my current, so I go up the green here.
Um, and this is nanoamps, so very, very small currents. I keep on this supermarketing branch.
But then at some point, and it's labeled as IS.
I then instead see a switching behavior. I suddenly go and follow this arrow, follow the blue line.
now what's recognised as a voltage state, this is a resistive state.
So I've got something that's behaving as a very sensitive threshold detector.
And I can keep repeating this sequence, and I can build some statistics.
And then that helps you understand, okay. I've got this switching thing that's happening. At what point does it happen?
With that, uh, this kind of setup. What we can now say is, on the left-hand side, we understand the physics is it's a particle in the world.
On the right-hand side, we understand that we can interpret this particle in a well.
As a switching event, which is the particle leaving network.
What we don't know is, is it leaving by classical, in other words, it goes over through the red trace.
Or was it tunneling? The orange trace? And so what we can propose.
is an experiment. where you're able to say, okay, let's repeat what we've done here on the right.
Let's do it while varying temperature. And then start to look at the statistics of this and see.
is my escape event something that is a classical or a non-classical behavior?
So that's… that's the motivation. Now on to what does the experiment itself look like? What were some of the key innovations behind it?
Uh, so you're going to need a dilution fridge, so this is an experiment that happens at low temperatures, um.
So productivity is low temperature phenomena. So, the main thing of what you're seeing here, this is a dilution friction.
For reference, the little gold connectors at the bottom, that's about the size of the tip of my finger.
So, it gives you an idea that this whole experiment, um, is about the diameter of my fist.
I just had pictures. Uh, at the bottom, that's where you've got the sample mount, that's where the Joseph device is going to go.
And then, on the left-hand side here, in yellow, what is that Joseph device physically?
It's a thin strip of niobium. That myobium will then oxidize, so I then get an album oxide on top.
And then it's a second strip of lead tin that goes on top, and that's why it's got.
That show. And so the junction itself is going through, so coming kind of out of this, um, projection.
Going from the niobium on the bottom through the niobium oxide.
through the lead tin on the top, and then out the other side, but that's why you've got these arrows on there that kind of goes down and then out.
Um, the final detail to call out is the copper filters on here. They will be explained in two slides time.
the race to this experiment, you end up needing a screened room.
So that's a giant Faraday cage, you need that to remove, um, RF and EMI.
Uh, because in 85. While you didn't have Wi-Fi, you didn't have, uh, you know, 5G.
You certainly did have a lot more AM radio, FM radio, radar, and so on, so you still needed to remove those things.
onto the filtering. Um, so any, uh… you know, resistor or something is going to have with it some associated voltage or current noise.
That's described by this IRMS term, so you can see that's the square root of 4 times Boltzmann's times temperature, uh, times the bandwidth you're measuring over.
Uh, divided by resistance. And if you put in conventional values, so room temperature, gigahertz frequencies, for example.
I'll end up with two micro-maps. And if you remember on the data I showed before, looking at 20 nanoamps.
That would mean I won't see anything. It's all going to be washed out by electrical noise.
So I need to have some type of filter that can reduce that to less than the nanow.
The type of filter that was is what's called a copper powder filter.
This was a key innovation in the paper. It was really the thing that made this possible.
What they're relying on is the idea of any AC currents that ever flows through a conductor.
has to go through, uh, what's called the skin depth, so… in the, uh, the picture in the middle here, you've got this circle. That circle's got this red color scale to it.
That color scale is effectively the current density. So you see it's really bright on the outside, it's really dim on the middle, that's telling you that the current at high frequencies has to go on that outer edge where the red is brightest.
So they made a filter where all of these little dots on the middle of it.
It's them putting copper powder alongside their conducting wire.
That copper powder meant that you now had a really large surface area.
And that surface area meant that you had a very high amount of attenuation at high frequencies, so.
In other words, a very effective, um. high frequency filter. And this really was a key innovation here.
Onto their, uh, experiments, so what's their results? So, what we're doing here is measuring a switching current.
And we're using that to give us a measurement of an escape rate of a particle. That's the experiment.
We're doing that while sweeping temperature. So the x-axis on this spot is temperature.
every one of these dots is what's that escape rate that's coming up. If I start at the very top and I look at the black dots only.
Then as I lower temperature, I see that the escape rate keeps decreasing.
It decreases in a way that's proportional to temperature. This is classical behavior, so it's the red going over the hill.
Um, type of stuff. But as we get to low temperature, we actually see a saturation.
That saturation at first, you say, ah, that's great.
This looks like evidence for quantum tunnelling. This is amazing.
In practice, though, what you don't know is, is it quantum tunnelling?
Or is it a noise mechanism that is still a classical red over the top of that energy barrier?
But just not energy that's coming from temperature. And so the way they calibrate that out.
is that they apply a magnetic field, and this is in situ. That magnetic field suppresses the superconductivity.
The suppressed supernativity suppresses, um… the transition where you'd expect this to occur.
So now, if you go from the black dots to the white circles.
Which are all sitting lower than this. That proves that their measurement sensitivity was lower.
Therefore, the saturation you see in black is not noise, this is a real effect.
And for that reason, this was evidence for macroscopic quantum tunneling. So the first part of action.
having shown that. What you can then say is.
What if I've got this potential where also this top image, we've got, um, so this is kind of a slice that we've received with it.
And I now know that the particle inside behaves in a way following quantum mechanics.
Well, then wouldn't I expect to see some energy levels?
So, the horizontal lines that go across that, sitting in the well.
Those are now energy levels. And then, so if I now expect to see those energy levels.
In that case, if I shine some radiation, so some 2GHz microwave time.
So the wiggly line with the H4 omega, that represents why microwave radiation coming in.
If I keep that on. then if I can tune these energy levels through that 2GHz.
I would expect to see some kind of resonant behavior here.
And then if we recall that by changing the eye bias term.
That potential landscape can swap. So, in the middle panel, and the insert of that panel, you can see you've got these squiggly shapes, the squiggly shapes are changing.
That's highlighting that as I change that eye bias.
I'm changing the potential landscape. And so then the baits are shown now in the middle panel, uh, the main part of it.
What you've got here is a measurement of that escape rate.
while I'm applying that 2GHz time. While I'm trimming the current, which is now on my x-axis.
And then in practice, what you see where the three arrows are.
is this spike that's occurring, saying. When it is possible to tune those energy levels such that they become resonant at that 2GHz, I'm seeing a resonant-enhanced, um.
escape right here. In other words. I've got evidence for quantized energy levels.
So these are the two key components that under… that sort of was… What does this win… this Nobel Prize been awarded for?
It is macroscopic quantum tunnelling, so that's the data on the left. We use evidence for quantized energy levels, that's the data on the right.
The reason why this matters is that if you combine those two things together.
You've now got evidence saying a artificial. A human constructed thing, an engineered thing, a macroscopic system.
is able to behave as an artificial atom. And that's the key reason why this is so interesting.
So on to what followed. You might say. We have an artificial atom, so surely what followed was a quantum computer.
Yeah, and that was 1985. In practice, in the field of superconductivity.
something else really, really big happened in the 80s.
So, on the left-hand side, we've got another paper. That paper is to do with the high temperature transition of IBCO.
On the right-hand side, you've got a plot of year versus critical temperature, so that's the temperature at which your conductor becomes superconducting.
You see the arrow point, it's that diamond in the middle, and if you notice that spike as it went from something around 30 to something around 100.
Right, this was one of the most exciting discoveries in all of condensed matter science.
And the idea, and lots of applications that could follow from, you know, room temperature super conductivity or a more accessible flavor of superconductivity.
this dominated the funding landscape. So, in the years that immediately followed this, quantum devices didn't yet emerge as a film. It took a bit more time.
If I look at what followed and go slightly later.
Um, indeed, we can get to that quantum computing, you know, kind of point here. So, at the top, let's first at least give a quick hand-wavy description of a qubit.
So we've got those energy levels, and the qubit is saying, I want to be able to manipulate the population of them.
So it's not enough to just observe them, so observing them is what happened before.
I now need to manipulate when am I in the ground state versus when am I in the state above, and put myself.
you know, arbitrarily between the two. That's the key thing that says I now have a Cuba.
In super complexing devices that occurred in 1999. in semiconducting devices, so another engineered system, another macroscopic system.
That happened in 2006. And so this Nobel Prize really underpins the idea that a engineered macroscopic.
Um, you know, quantum system. can exist, and therefore you could build a quantum computer based on it.
That underpins the so-called engineered qubits. Well, it doesn't underpin is the so-called natural qubit, so then that's where the same dynamic of how do I produce a qubit, what's the physical basis of the system of that.
And that could be trapped times for another photonics on the left, or neutral atoms at the bottom.
Um, and others, so just being clear on what this price relates to versus what it doesn't relate to.
Uh, context in the UK, so quantum computing. Uh, in the UK, this is now recognised as part of the UK's IS-8 within the industrial strategy of 2025.
Uh, a long-standing component of the UK's National Quantum Technologies Programme.
And in the next 10 years, you've now got what's called Quantum Mission 1.
This is the computing mission. That computing mission is for 10 to the 12.
operations on a system by the year 2035. For reference, today, the most powerful quantum computer is maybe 1 to 2000.
So, quite a long way to go. About 10 years is also a long time.
Um, what this doesn't specify, though, is the modality, and again, emphasizing this is not a superconducting qubit price.
And this is not something that underpins all approaches to quantum computing.
This description does not say it must be based on the technology that has come out from this Nobel Prize.
And if I think about the UKRI landscape on quantum computing.
Uh, it's on the left-hand side, we've got NQCC, so our focus is around trying to make sure that the government is able to act as an informed.
Customer, user, procurer, funder. any of those kind of dynamics. And the way that we do that is through.
build capability through performing the research on those systems, know how to do the integration.
Or how to run applications, know how to, um… facilitate access in a computing model.
Um, and then likewise, working on, uh, a kind of quantum-ready workforce.
In the middle, you've also got the Hartree center, so there you've got a focus on business transformation, the adoption of computing technology in a general sense.
But an emerging part of computing is, of course, quantum computing.
So therefore, you can look at workflow and infrastructure development there that sits within the Hartree program.
Uh, on the right-hand side, then, uh, there's the so-called quantum hubs, so these are networks of universities doing research.
the quantum computing hub is now called QCI3. Um, so then, like, say, it's a network of research that looks at, um, underpinning science and applied, uh, research on.
quantum computing. So in summary, this has really been an experiment to do with when does something behave in a quantum mechanical way.
And this is the experiment that tried to… that answered that question.
And what it was able to find is that by exploring the estate rates.
of, um, you know, a superconducting device. But this physics is not limited to a supermacting device.
you could demonstrate that you had something where macroscopic content tunnelling happened.
Where, um, you had evidence for quantized energy levels collectively, this giving you a artificial atom.
That's what this prize has been awarded for. Um, given a little bit of perspective on the fact that not all quantum computers are based on solid-state technologies.
a bit of perspective on the UK's National Quantum Technologies Program.
And a final extra caveat to say. Every time you hear quantum doesn't only mean quantum computing.
So the quantum technologies as a whole include sensing, communications, precision time navigation, so… This talk is very focused on the computing side only.
But ultimately, at the time that this work took place.
Quantum computing was not an… was not an established concept.
This was exploring the frontiers and boundary of quantum mechanics.
And so with that, we'll go back to, um… Yeah, Jean-Cont, Michelle Devre, John Martinez, so the Nobel laureates for this year.
Um, paper in question, and thank you for listening.
Thank you, Jonathan. Well, both of our speakers have really decoded.
The complex work, which is very consequential. Now, we do have our beamline scientists. Now, I mean, uh, you know, Beamline scientists do play things up to the edge, but he is here, so let me… Uh, take this opportunity to introduce him.
Uh, we have Dr. Mark Warren, who will be covering.
work which was awarded the Chemistry Noel Prize this year. Uh, Dr. Mark Warren is a senior beamline scientist on the chemical.
Rafi Beamline I-19 at Diamond light source, the UK's national, uh.
synchrotron, I have this, yeah. Uh, he earned his PhD at the University of Bath under Professor Paul Rathway by focusing on, uh.
photocrystallographic studies of. linkage isomerism.
After post-doctoral research at Imperial College on excited states in fluorescent proteins, he joined Diamond, where his research now explores.
real-time structural transformations in functional materials under light pressure, gas uptake.
and electrical fields. Mark has worked with metal organic frameworks since his PhD over the past 15 years.
has designed specialized gas control systems to study. MOFs, gas uptake, and kinetics.
So, no one is better placed to connect this year's No Prize in chemistry to the science happening here on our campus, so please.
Welcome, Mark. Uh, all yours.
Okay. So this… this is fine.
Perfect. Oh, thank you very much for the introduction, and it's been a real kind of honour today to talk about the, sort of, Chemistry Nobel Prize 2025. And as you're saying, I was sort of juggling a kind of workshop today, so I've had this sort of, like, a.
Come out the workshop, and then I'll go back in after, so apologize for not being here at the start.
So, if I told you, kind of like in the 1980s, uh, kind of, I was coming up with a project.
Uh, that, uh, could kind of, like, uh, kind of pull kind of clean drinking water out to, kind of, desert air.
You could capture carbon dioxide, like a kind of giant sponge.
Or kind of, like, be kind of a huge kind of catalytic surface area, uh, the size of a football kind of pitch that we could hold in the palm of your hand.
or deliver drugs precisely exactly where you need them as a medical device, separate gases.
be a hunt, uh, kind of like a energy storage material, and, uh, kind of, like, be a, uh.
Uh, kind of, like, look at… to analyze water, and also going to be a sensor material for, kind of, chemicals, pollutants, and explosives. I would say, and I'm quite an off-specific person, I would say that was being optimistic.
But 30 years kind of, sort of later, uh, kind of like these applications exist, and they all fall under the, kind of, the class of materials, metal organic frameworks.
Now, these are two, kind of, three, kind of, like, uh, like, electorates, and what's quite nice is they all kind of came in different, kind of, like, their kind of stages of where kind of metal organic frameworks came from.
So we first of all kind of start with the concept.
Within the application and streamline. So what I'm going to do in this talk today is going to go through that sort of process and how meta-organic frameworks came to be.
And then what I'm going to do is I'll kind of talk a little bit about some of the research we've done, kind of, sort of Row, and kind of… and some… and some applications.
So, this is another computer, so I'm really interested to see if the videos work, but we will see. So, uh, kind of like, this is kind of Rich Robson, kind of, the University of, kind of, Melbourne, and he was really interested in, sort of, like, in diamond.
And as many as you know, kind of a diamond actually is made up of carbon, and each of the carbons in the diamond is a kind of, like, connected, uh, kind of covalently to kind of four other carbon.
kind of tetrahedral kind of geometry. Oh, look at that, it doesn't work. Good. And what this does is this can allow the center of A3 build up to make a kind of, like, a crystallite, crystalline lattice, which gives it some really interesting, kind of, like, uh, physical properties. It's extremely hard.
Just thermal connectivity, high reflective index, and chemical resistance. And kind of Richard was looking and saying, well, is this material kind of has these properties?
can we kind of alter it to sort of look at the different properties? Can we make it on a slightly, kind of, larger scale?
And what do you want, kind of like did is he, kind of, like, looked towards other materials which had this tetrahedral kind of geometry.
So this is sort of like a, kind of like a organic kind of molecule. And so we've got a kind of meter in the center, kind of, with a kind of fork kind of phenyl groups, kind of, like, around it.
And at the end of the 44 position, we've got these kind of nitrile, uh, sort of groups, they can see triple bond, uh, nitrogen.
And as you can see, this looks a lot like, kind of like your, kind of, like, tetrahedral carbon, which is… which is in diamond.
Now, this nitrile group can really kind of nicely, kind of, like, kind of, uh.
Uh, connect to these kind of copper metal nodes.
And if we look at the, kind of, like, uh… we look at this, this is kind of exactly the same for the geometry as a carbon. These metal nodes.
Combined, kind of, like, essentially, geometry, that can also be built up in exactly the same way the, sort of, the diamonds can.
But, because those kind of the link is in between have sort of grown, we get this kind of, uh, kind of void space.
This is donated by these kind of, like, yellow balls up here, but these are kind of channels which can go in and out of this kind of crystal, or kind of the lattice. And it has a huge internal kind of surface error.
Surface, kind of, like, area.
So, one of the things that kind of like OSH does is this is the first MOF that's actually, sort of, been, uh, present.
But it was fragile, and it couldn't really be used, kind of, like, as an application.
And a number of years later. kind of like a Cotherweger. Um, he actually kind of sort of got the first moth, which could actually be used, kind of, like, um, as a kind of function material.
So, one of the ways he did this, and I'm going to go into this a bit later, is he introduced the, kind of, like, frameworks which are slightly flexible.
So instead of going more rigid to actually make these kind of an application, they kind of, like, a kind of slight movement of these kind of crystals.
So that, kind of, when it could be used as gases go in and out, it kind of, like, it was able to inflect around those and didn't break up as a system.
So this, for the first time, did the making of more stable, kind of porous, and kind of functional.
And the real thing he did is he had the idea that actually because of this huge internal surface area.
Um, it can be used as a kind of, like, a gas storage kind of material.
And not only did he have the idea for that.
Actually, I'll go into the, kind of, the framework first of all.
So, this, instead of these kind of, like, um… Tetrahedral kind of nodes, whether you've got the kind of metal.
Um, this actually, kind of, like, was one which used a 4-4 by pyridine.
And here, the kind of like in the center, we've got the metal, kind of like, uh… Does it work on here?
Okay. Um, it really felt these sort of metal notes, and if you have a sentence dictated by these sort of dark, um, color, kind of, like.
I think… and these actually kind of formed instead of, kind of, like, your kind of 3D lasses, actually produced.
these kind of, like, 2D sheets. And these 2D sheets kind of, like, intertwined with, kind of, like, ones on the top.
And kind of… and the bottom. I mean, it's been lattice, and again, produced these kind of, pores.
And when you look at, kind of, like, these, kind of, like, uh, these kind of void spaces within this call, it doesn't look like they're actually kind of interconnected.
But if we can sort of turn this, uh…
If we kind of turn this around, we can actually kind of see that these kind of voice faces are kind of, like, very slightly connected.
Down in one particular, one particular direction. But, actually, if you look at the size of actually, kind of, like, carbon dioxide, for example.
It wouldn't be able to actually fit if this was a completely rigid material.
and actually going to show is actually when the carbon dioxide kind of travels into these pores. Actually, there's a flexibility within this kind of framework, um, that actually when the carbon dioxide goes down, could fit within these pores.
And very nicely, you can sort of taken from the paper, we can see that actually showed that, kind of, like, this kind of my graph shows the uptake.
Of, kind of, a carbon dioxide against chemical pressure, and it can actually be, kind of, not just uptake gas.
But it can actually be removed, and kind of uptake and removed.
Which is kind of really, really nice to see. And this really kind of paved the way, the excitement for actually these materials can be really useful, kind of, like, as a kind of applications.
And this kind of, like, brings us on to, kind of, like, our third laureate, kind of, like, oh my yaki.
Omayagi kind of came, and he can sort of really streamline the process, made this sort of re-commercial and kind of, like, produce a huge number, kind of, of framework materials.
And he was kind of very interested, instead of these 4-4, like, bipyridine kind of ligands, but with these carbon dioxide organic ligands.
So what this is, is… I can't see a bit up here.
Shop to the next one here. So, what he used is he's got the organic ligand at the kind of top.
And these organic ligands come about 3 to carboxylic group, combine to kind of metal… a kind of metal centers. And one of, kind of, the most famous work he's involved with has these, uh, kind of zinc.
Uh, zinc, uh, kind of 04, uh, kind of, like, uh, central nodes, and to them, we're going to get attached these kind of carbon dioxide kind of models.
So I just can sort of spin that around so you can see, kind of, like, where, kind of, like, where they are.
And what happens is these can kind of self-assemble, kind of, like, into kind of, like, a jewelry action.
and form these kind of, like, um, organic, um.
These metal framework materials. And this is MOF fun, and it had a kind of, like, a real step up in stability compared to all its, kind of, like, predecessors.
But what was, kind of, sort of, really nice is you've got these kind of central, kind of, like, nodes of pattern, a kind of, like, pattern wheels. We call this, sort of, metal.
We've got this organic linker in the middle, and these produce frameworks. And, uh, Kayema Yaga was the first person to coin the word, kind of like, metal organic, kind of, like, frameworks.
And what I think is really nice is actually, uh, that this little organic ligand.
What we can do is it's not, uh, kind of like, it's not fixed.
What we can do is, it's very easy to kind of either functionalize or kind of change the kind of, like, the shape or size of it.
kind of, like, to adapt the kind of framework.
So all of a sudden, what you can do is you can customize your kind of framework to your particular application, sort of, like, needs. And, uh, kind of, in this kind of particular paper, can you produce 16 different sort of linkers.
Kind of like, which can have either expanded those or contracted them.
And by changing… thinking of, like, the method node, it changes the electronic properties.
So it kind of, like, it can change the card distribution, or the bind it binding strength.
You can change the, kind of, functional groups, kind of all the linkers, and what this does is that you can control the gas affinity and selectivity.
You can change that to your kind of, like, length, and that means, kind of, like, uh.
It actually changes, uh, the, kind of, like, the pore size and shapes. So if you are doing… can control the diffusion rates and storage capacity of your frameworks.
And from this sort of point, there was a huge number of, kind of, framework materials, uh, which could have happened. On the left-hand corner.
We've got all the different, sort of, metal nodes that can happen, and on the right-hand side, all the different ligands.
And what it meant for the really first time, instead of making a material, and then finding out its, kind of, like, its properties in gas uptake.
What they could do is actually kind of design a moth for a particular need. So if you know there's a gas of a certain type, you could use your kind of linker and the size of it to make sure it's going to fit just that gas root, and not larger gases. Or, if you wanted certain selectivity.
You can add a functional group, which we know would bind to that, kind of, like, that particular gas that you're interested in.
And now, kind of, like, almost kind of, like, over just 30 years later, there are over 120,000 kind of structures in the Cambridge, uh.
central database. the CCD academic.
And, uh, kind of like, what's really nice is actually a vast number of, kind of, like, university departments have someone in their department which actually, uh, kind of, works on these kind of framework or MOF materials.
So hopefully, kind of, like, quite quickly, I've gone through the, kind of, like, where metro frameworks have, kind of, occurred.
From conception, application, to the kind of streamlining, and then to the explosion, kind of, like, in the field.
And what I'm going to talk about, uh, sort of next, is actually kind of like, uh.
Where are we now? Where's the science looking at, and how are we investigating these, you know, science, and actually what we're doing on, sort of, that route, kind of like, in particular, at Diamond.
So, one of the first, um, over 15 years ago now, one of the first actual kind of, like, a archetypal, um.
archetypal systems that I was working on, and looking at gas uptake was this kind of, like, uh… Cobalt, BIPI, kind of butter nitrate, and actually, if we're looking back at this, like, retrospectively after doing this talk.
I realize it's exactly the same one as that very first, kind of, like, a moth that cut away we can design.
And just to kind of reiterate, these can produce these sort of, like, pores that are going to travel down, uh, kind of, like, a vehicle frameworks. And… When we've kind of looked at these before, we did sort of gas absorption uptakes. We know it absorbs gas, but what was really missing from this is actually exactly where those kind of gas molecules sit within the framework.
And if you know exactly where they can sit within the framework, or where they bind, and how they bind, and the kinetics involved with this, it means that you can kind of, like, design and kind of make better, better materials, better functioning materials.
So, what we did to kind of, like, on, kind of, like, I-19, is we can take this, kind of, like, a kind of crystal of this, we put this on, kind of, like, our beam, and this is a Christographic experiment, so we get three.
3D molecular movie of it. We can take it from kind of surveyed.
We can place it under vacuum, which removes any guest kind of molecules, and then we can kind of apply the gas of our, kind of, um, of our choosing, and we can see that sort of going into the ports.
We can also see the electron density, and what we can actually do is actually kind of model these kind of gas molecules.
within those kind of voice spaces. And we can actually there understand how they're packing, where they're packing, and we can say, kind of, like, how much there is in there.
More recently, over the last, kind of, like, a number of years.
Before, what we were doing is we were taking one crystal, and this wasn't good comparison of the bulk material.
And what we wanted to do is actually kind of… and what we found there was differences between looking at as the bulk and the single crystal.
And one way to overcome this is actually using serial crystallography.
And so what we do here, instead of having one crystal, we do these experiments on, kind of, like, tens of thousands of crystals.
And we can actually kind of look at the distribution.
In this particular framework, it's kind of a bit like a wine rack.
And actually, kind of, as you kind of, like, remove gas, it goes kind of like a kind of… it squashes down, and then as you apply gas, it kind of fills… fills back up, so it's completely, kind of, sort of flexible kind of framework.
But what's really interesting when we did this experiment before is we saw that on one crystal, we saw before.
And we saw an after. But as soon as you bring in a kind of serial methods onto this and looking at thousands of crystals, what we can see is the kind of real large distribution.
I've kind of, like, uh, results and the spread of the distribution.
As it's going through that on the bot.
Likewise, we can get kind of like a… this is kind of like a comparison of two, kind of, like, framework… flexible frameworks.
At the top here, as we kind of go, kind of, like, through, uh, apply gas to these kind of crystals.
What we can see is we can see it going from one state and snapping to, like, the other states. It's either kind of in one, uh, one state or state the other.
And each one of these sort of red dots is a falcon of dimensional crystal structure, so we can fully refine it and see exactly where those can look like.
Uh, the CO2 molecules are. But if we take a kind of related one, what we can see here is this flexible kind of framework is really dynamic because it's not so kind of straightforward.
And really, sort of, like, uh, there's a lot of movement and lots of distribution as it takes up gas.
So what I'm going to go through is kind of like, kind of two, kind of, like, uh, kind of scientists in the UK, uh, which you can sort of, like, uh, kind of.
did a huge amount of work moths over the last, kind of, sort of, 20 years.
And this is going to the first second of, like, econom.
And what have they done, and this is kind of like just going into two particular.
kind of applications. If this is designed these flexible frameworks.
And what's really nice about this is you can actually kind of do, kind of like an ink in a sort of real time, is the separation of CO2 and kind of, sort of, uh, kind of, like, and methane. And each one of these, you can kind of model with a crystal structure, the gas isotherm.
powder diffraction and neutron to get this kind of expertise into, like, the fine details.
And over the years, he's kind of, like, been able to iterate and refine this to be a really good separation on sort of side.
Um, between, kind of, like, uh, these two industrial-relevant gases.
Another kind of problem scientists in the UK is a kind of Russell Morrison Andrews, and he was really interested in, kind of, a nitric… nitric.
Electric oxide. And nitric oxide, as many of you know, is a really toxic, horrible gas.
But on, kind of, like, kind of, like, low levels, actually, it's got some good, kind of, like, bio, uh.
activity. And… Russell was able to do is, when he came to Diamond, he was able to, kind of, like, take a, kind of, like.
His framework, which kind of contained, kind of, watering to start, is able to remove activated sample by removing that water.
And then I kind of apply, kind of like, uh, kind of like the nitric oxide, and you can actually see those kind of bind to the metal sites within the pool.
Now, what's really nice about this is it's actually not the uptake, it's actually the release. This kind of, when it releases, especially in, kind of, like, a kind of water-ish conditions.
releases the NO very, very slowly. And what kind of Russell has kind of really nicely done is he's included this in a polymer.
to contain within needles. And what this means is, kind of like, as the needle goes in.
kind of, like, um, instead of getting clogged over, kind of, the course of days, or kind of, like, weeks, um, what it means is actually the needle, because of the very slow release of, kind of, NO, it stops any clogging or any cofactors, so these needles can stay in for prolonged periods of time.
And this could be really, kind of, like, kind of important, for example, kind of glucose monitors for diabetes.
And with that, I'd like to kind of summarize. So, moths are kind of like a, kind of like the Nobel Prize. I kind of like three very well-deserved, kind of, uh, liberal electorates.
Um, these abuse kind of ultra-porous materials, enabling, kind of, a number of, kind of, different applications, from water harvesting, uh, kind of, like, to.
Chemical can sense him. Um, the impact has kind of begun across so many different, kind of, areas that kind of, like, areas of sight, and now we can fine-tune the, kind of, like, the frameworks for particular, kind of, uh, particular, kind of, needs.
I'd like to thank you for listening.
Thank you very much. Wow, so… A big, uh, hence for all our pre-speakers, for really summarizing the work.
Uh, we do have some time for questions, and we do have speakers willing to answer your questions, so please, uh… Uh, if you do remember.
to ask questions from the previous sessions as well, uh, we can have now discussion and questions. So, go ahead.
Uh, yeah. Sorry, Jared, please go ahead.
Just on the last talk. Is there anything interesting about the optical properties of these MOFs under.
Laseration, can they be tuned in some way, or made to release the materials more easily?
Yes, um, yeah, it's a really good question, and the answer is yes.
So, um, you know, I talked about all those linkers, uh, you can get, kind of, like, functional materials. You can put functional materials which actually kind of, like, can change or flip.
within… within lights. Now, exactly that, and there's a couple of different isomerases and that sort of side of things. And what that means is you can add gases into the frameworks.
You can flip them, lock in those gases into place, and then you can remove them, or they can apply. The theory is you can remove them and then release that at a later date when you open them up when you want to, so you can actually.
Not just absorb it, it can have it.
Uh, same… same talk, sorry. Apologies to the other two. Um, gas filtration.
Uh, why do I not see more moths in the context of, sort of, air separation units, or rather rare gas filtration?
I think the answer is the technology's there, and we've done it from.
Especially from, like, I've got a number, there's a number of papers out which are looking at… Cryptolog separation, um, and so there is, uh, there is actually… it's going to put it in the slide.
Shows exactly that. Now, I think we're occurred over the last, uh, sort of.
30 years, but it's still in its infancy. I think the actual applications and seeing them in world is going to really get slow. It's just not quite reached industrial size. But there are companies that are set up to do exactly that.
Okay, more questions? For physics?
Thanks, yeah, I was interested in the Joseph's injunction that was being used for the initial paper. You were describing this as having two different superconductors on either side, and I was.
A bit surprised by that. It sounds like a complication that you would have wanted to avoid.
I guess the best way to frame that, so… Nowadays, you would use, uh, like, lithography techniques, uh, you know, deposition tools and.
You'd be able to have a lot more, kind of, process control.
Uh, in the work that's the, you know, the sort of 60s, 70s, 80s around drastal junctions, um.
you know, these were making use of the fact that when I'm saying lead tin, I'm describing salt.
Um, yeah, so what did some of these things look like? It was… Uh, a blob of a, uh, you know, some kind of superconductor.
The natural oxide, and then a blob of, um, you know, solar applied to it, and that's the thing he was working.
Um, so you're right to say that seems a bit better.
That's just me pointing to, uh, you know, an experiment that's, uh, 40 plus years old.
Some people, how you're doing today?
Another Josephson Junction question. How's that been… I've got two, actually. Um… Does it matter how sick the insulating layer is, number one.
And number two, if there were a. classical movement.
through that insulator, what would that actually look like, rather than the quantum tunneling?
Okay, um… Right, so the first one, uh… Only example show.
I was saying 2GHz was frequency. Um, you can calculate what frequency you expected that to be based on the Josephson junction.
Characteristics. And then your question of what if the insulator was picked up.
You would be able to model. What that would mean for those characteristics, and it would just change the frequency.
That's the simple last bit. Um, the second thing, saying, um… What if I put something that isn't a Cooper pair that's trying to tunnel? This has got some.
But yeah, so normal, uh, bit. So, there's many, many quick steps that I took through.
One of them is that when I showed an equivalent circuit diagram, there was an X for a junction that had a capacitor and had a resistor.
The reason that the capacitor and resistor is in that circuit mode.
is exactly the… what your point, which is that.
In practice, not every electron has formed group of pair.
So, in a real system, I've always got some leftover number of electrons.
Those left over number of electrons. you know, if I'm applying some bias to doing something, they are also seeing that, and they are going to flow through.
So there's always, what you're describing happens. And then you model that in a circuit parameter that says, okay, there's a resistor to the side.
Because I've always got some conventional electrons that I see.
The insulator has a resistor within that capacity pump.
Can I follow up. Got it. See, like, I'm asking.
let's say you just go thicker and thicker and thicker on the insulator.
Is there a point at which you cannot apply a frequency high enough?
For that tunneling to occur. You… yeah, okay, so… So, one of the things I didn't come back, um… When you've got a super… so you've got two characteristic length scales at play. So, these are what you call the penetration length and the BCS coherence then.
Um, job, and I apologize. Um, these are telling you that net scales over which the superconducting, uh.
like the Wave packet, the mid form. If you're a translator gets too long compared to that.
then it's not possible to sustain a supermarket. In practice, that's, uh, it's our border nanometers, typically.
Um, but it's also an extra that scales with the TC, uh, inverse.
So, when I showed the example of high-temperatures and IPCO.
In that story, yes, you could make the jury deduction, but your junction is a… Uh, like a crystalline defect.
So, our voice limbs down to become so small.
It's now less for the moment. In the case of another super serial like albuminium, it's possible for that to become.
No questions.
Uh, hi, I have a question for… with regards to the BioMed.
Of course. Uh, thank you so much for the talk. It was very informative. I just had a question with regards to the application of the box.
P3 gene itself, because. If I understand correctly, you mentioned that when they.
Not in the gene into the T cells. They… the 9 T cells, they matured.
And I was wondering. How we could use this specifically?
With the applications? of the T-regulatory cells, because you mentioned that.
We could use… the TU regulatory cells.
to target different kinds of cells in medical applications, but.
With regards to the FOXP3 discovery itself, how… this work. Oh, sorry, this question's confusing.
That's fine. Um… It's been noted also that the Fox P3 gene is dose-responsive as well, so if you have one copy, you get a certain copies, you get more.
So, it's possible to tune it. Okay. So to a certain degree as well.
Um, and obviously, there's going to be mutations. Even natural maze artificially, which.
Are going to affect its affinity and what it does.
So… there's quite a… it's quite a wide open field.
Okay, thank you. Thanks, more questions?
I'm very questioning. Um… Can the FOXP3 gene turn on and off in an individual's lifetime? Is it a gene that can be expressed at different times?
As in, why do some people only get an autoimmune disorder when they turn 35?
Oh, good question. Um… Couldn't know, don't know.
Yeah. I'm trying to think of… So we have a…
Any more questions there in the room? Anybody from the Zoom?
If you'd like to ask something, please do unmute and… Shoot.
Looks like not, so… Let's thank our speakers again for really interesting.
They have really decoded the complex subjects in a very simple manner, and uh… We have coffee and cookies outside, so let's, uh, please join for the discussion there. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Okay, thank you.
Most fun. pellet-type material.
You… you can make… Yes, I can't. Okay. That's the problem. I think that's… this is the… this is the worst… where's the industry development ever been told me.
I'm not sure the name. Yeah, uh, see if I am.
It'd be a really good person to ask, because we are very limited. Thank you. Thank you, yeah, it's very much.
One of the things that. sits on the ground.
It didn't work for us. Yeah. Thanks for that. Please do join… It's worthwhile trying to see what happens.
Yeah, yeah. Um, somebody lost their ancient.
I've heard it will be outgoing.
If not… So it's nothing, I think.
I mean, put you…