Professor Richard Haley

Professor of Low Temperature Physics

Profile

Rich Haley is an experimental low temperature condensed matter physicist. His research portfolio runs from blue-skies work in superfluid helium-3 at world-record low temperatures through to the technology transfer and knowledge exchange of refrigeration, instrumentation and ultra-sensitive measurement techniques to partners internal and external to Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é, both academic and industrial.

Lancaster Low Temperature Physics exploits bespoke cooling technology to carry out fundamental work on the properties of helium-3, the light isotope of helium, which forms a unique superfluid liquid where friction vanishes and all atoms are in the same quantum-mechanical state. This is the purest and most complex system for which we already have the "Theory of Everything", and has an internal structure that mirrors that of space-time itself. Consequently, as well as being an ideal analogue for almost everything in condensed matter physics, superfluid helium-3 can be used to simulate cosmological phenomena such as black holes.

With a reputation for developing techniques to achieve the lowest possible temperatures, the group is currently leading efforts to cool on-chip nanofabricated systems to the sub-millikelvin regime. Meeting this challenge will open up a new frontier regime for devices such as qubits and quantum-engineeered sensors.

Rich gained his doctorate at the University of Manchester, working on superfluid helium-3, and then worked as a postdoc at the University of Florida performing ultra-low temperature measurements on solid helium. He returned to the UK at the end of 1997 to take up a postdoc in the Lancaster Ultra-Low Temperature group, and in 2002 was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, extended to 2010. Rich was Head of Low Temperature Physics 2014-18, and led the IsoLab facility build, becoming its Inaugural Director in 2017.


01/04/2024 → 31/03/2025
Research


21/11/2022 → 31/03/2023
Research


01/12/2020 → 31/03/2025
Research


01/01/2019 → 31/12/2023
Research


01/03/2018 → 31/08/2020
Research


01/05/2015 → 30/04/2016
Research


01/07/2013 → 31/03/2018
Research


01/10/2011 → 30/09/2015
Research


01/04/2011 → 31/03/2012
Research


Festival/Exhibition/Concert

  • FST Sustainability Advisory Committee
  • Low Temperature Physics
  • Quantum Technology Centre