Research Assessment Exercise 2008
90% of Royal Holloway Physics research judged to be of international quality
The results of the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise, an independent measure of the quality of research for UK University Departments, confirm the high international research standing of Physics at Royal Holloway, University of London.
90% of our research has been judged to be of international quality, while 55% is internationally excellent or world leading.
Our profile is based on the submission of more than 90% of total staff, 28 in total. Of the submitted staff eight are 'Early Career Researchers'. At RHUL, research is carried out in the broad areas of Particle Physics, Condensed Matter Physics and Theoretical Physics.
Professor Saunders, Head of the Department of Physics said,
“I am delighted with the overall assessment of our research. The outcome confirms our excellent international research standing and represents a significant improvement on the last assessment, RAE 2001, in which we achieved the very high grade of 5 on a different scale of 1 to 5*. We are particularly proud of the fact that this is a measure of the entire department, including a large number of outstanding young staff who are just beginning their research careers and show enormous future promise. Future prospects for the Department are excellent”.
Research highlights and recent initiatives include:
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strong involvement with experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN.
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research on accelerator science in the John Adams Institute (a collaboration with the University of Oxford), recently enhanced by a new appointment.
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a new initiative in Particle Physics Phenomenology. Together with partner Universities of the South East of England Physics Network (SEPNET) two recent appointments at RHUL (after the RAE assessment deadline) initiated a new theoretical activity focused on understanding results from the LHC.
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the founding of the Hubbard Theory Institute for the Theory of Condensed Matter (in collaboration with Harwell Campus and UCL/London Centre for nanotechnology), with several new appointments to be made.
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the London Microkelvin Centre, part of the low temperature physics research group, was established as a partner in the international European Microkelvin Collaboration.
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research appointments and fellowship awards have underlined investment in quantum information processing, following the major construction of new laboratory facilities in cryogenics and nanofabrication dedicated to research in quantum control, quantum noise limited amplification and the exploration of the quantum – classical crossover.
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new initiatives in biomedical magnetic resonance and terahertz imaging
Professor Saunders also pointed to other indicators of the research quality at Royal Holloway. The impact of research in Physics, as measured by citations of published work in the period 2002-2006, was assessed through independently commissioned research (Evidence Ltd. June 2008). This internationally accepted measure of research excellence found that RHUL Physics had about double the UK average number of papers in the “highly cited” category (those cited at a rate more than eight times the times world average). On this measure RHUL significantly out-performs the baseline of UK Physics Departments graded 5 and 5* in RAE 2001.