Welcome
Professor Andrew Briggs is the inaugural holder of the Chair of Nanomaterials at the University of Oxford. His research interests focus on materials and techniques for quantum technologies and their incorporation into practical devices. Current hot topics include vibrational states of nanotubes and charge transport through single molecules in graphene nanogaps, and machine learning for measuring and tuning quantum devices. He has more than 650 publications, with over 28,000 citations.
ISSR book prize 2023 winner!
‘One of the most striking developments in work on science and religion in recent years has been the increasing focus, not just on how science and religion relate to each other, but on how they each contribute to human flourishing. Briggs and Reiss have provided an excellent and much-needed conceptual framework for understanding “human flourishing”, and how scientific developments and spiritual wisdom contribute to it. They take us through the different dimensions of human flourishing (material, relational and transcendent); the pillars of human flourishing (truth, meaning, and purpose), and discuss how all this is working itself out in different aspects of the contemporary world. Their writing is accessible and gripping, full of striking anecdotes and pithy summaries of scientific research.’ (Professor Fraser Watts, Executive Secretary of the International Society for Science and Religion)
Recently Published
Charge-State Dependent Vibrational Relaxation in a Single-Molecule Junction
Phys. Rev. Lett. [PDF]
| The outcome of an electron-transfer process is determined by the quantum-mechanical interplay between electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom.
Nonequilibrium vibrational dynamics are known to direct electron-transfer mechanisms in molecular systems; however the structural features of a molecule that lead to certain modes being pushed out of equilibrium are not well understood. Herein, we report on electron transport through a porphyrin dimer molecule, weakly coupled to graphene electrodes, that displays sequential tunneling within the Coulomb-blockade regime. The sequential transport is initiated by current-induced phonon absorption and proceeds by rapid sequential transport via a nonequilibrium vibrational distribution of low-energy modes, likely related to torsional molecular motions. We demonstrate that this is an experimental signature of slow vibrational dissipation and obtain a lower bound for the vibrational relaxation time of 8 ns, a value dependent on the molecular charge state. |
- Statistical signature of electrobreakdown in graphene nanojunctions. C Evangeli, S Tewari, JM Kruip, X Bian, JL Swett, J Cully, J Thomas, G Andrew D Briggs, Jan A Mol. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (27), e2119015119 (2022) [PDF]
- Implementation of Quantum Level Addressability and Geometric Phase Manipulation in Aligned Endohedral Fullerene Qudits. Shen Zhou, Jiayue Yuan, Zi‐Yu Wang, Kun Ling, Peng‐Xiang Fu, Yu‐Hui Fang, Ye‐Xin Wang, Zheng Liu, Kyriakos Porfyrakis, G Andrew D Briggs, Song Gao, Shang‐Da Jiang. Angewandte Chemie [PDF]
Pre-print Publications
- Phase-Coherent Charge Transport through a Porphyrin Nanoribbon-Graphene Junction. Zhixin Chen, Jie-Ren Deng, Songjun Hou, Xinya Bian, Jacob L Swett, Qingqing Wu, Jonathan Baugh, G Andrew D Briggs, Jan A Mol, Colin J Lambert, Harry L Anderson, James O Thomas. arXiv:2205.08499 [PDF]
- Identifying Pauli spin blockade using deep learning. Jonas Schuff, Dominic T Lennon, Simon Geyer, David L Craig, Federico Fedele, Florian Vigneau, Leon C Camenzind, Andreas V Kuhlmann, G Andrew D Briggs, Dominik M Zumbühl, Dino Sejdinovic, Natalia Ares. arXiv:2202.00574 [PDF]
Companies commercialising research results
QuantrolOx is building automated machine learning based control software for quantum technologies to tune, stabilise, and optimise qubits. For more information visit the website https://quantrolox.com/
QuantrolOx news….
QuantrolOx raises €10.5m to stabilise quantum computers
https://sifted.eu/articles/quantrolox-quantum-computers-tuning-news/
LocatorX provides robust, cost-effective means of managing inventory and assets.
Film of Andrew’s flying adventures around the Mediterranean
View the two-part documentary film of The Penultimate Curiosity which Roger Wagner and Andrew Briggs made. The film includes sequences flying to locations in Europe and beyond, as well as in Galloway, Cambridge, and Oxford.
Film: Matter and Spirit
Andrew Briggs arrives at the Isle of Skye for a conversation with Ian McGilchrist, author of The Matter With Things. They discuss the arrow of time and how the material world seems to call us out to something beyond itself, in ways that Andrew has written about in It Keeps Me Seeking. Watch the conversation here.