• Canada
• 2013-2022close
• UK Research and Innovation close
• UKRI|EPSRC close
• OA Publications Mandate: No close
• 2015 close
• 2019 close

Condensed matter physics has developed a relatively complete theory of common phases in materials leading to many technologically important devices including electronic screens, memory storage, and switching devices. Landau, or mean-field theory, has provided a framework to model, predict, and understand phases and transitions in a surprisingly diverse variety of materials and also dynamical systems. While these conventional ground states have proven technologically important and the underlying theory represents a major success for scientists, these phases have proven incredibly difficult to suppress and often emerge when new materials properties are sought or engineered. To discover novel phases that will lead to a new materials revolution, these common phases need to be suppressed to allow exotic and unconventional properties to emerge. The most common vehicle to turn off conventional phases in materials has been through the introduction of disorder through chemical doping resulting in strong random fields. Many important theories have been formulated and tested to describe the effects of random fields and in particular to account for the fine balance between surface and bulk free energy. However, the use of disorder has proved limiting as properties are often templated into the material and not directly controllable and also the resulting ground state of the material is difficult to understand. Another route, which has more recently been explored in the last decade, to suppress conventional phases is by introducing strong fluctuations. While this can be trivially done with temperature, new phases have emerged by studying quantum systems where the physics are governed by quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The study of quantum systems has resulted in the discovery of many new phases of matter including high temperature superconductors and also quantum spin-liquids where the magnetism is dynamic at any temperature. A limitation of quantum fluctuations is that the properties do not carry over directly to ferroelectric based systems and also multiferroics where magnetic and structural properties are strongly coupled. Also, owing to the strong fluctuating nature of the ground state, the properties have not been found to be easily tunable limiting immediate use for applications. This proposal aims to therefore take a different route by studying classically frustrated systems where a large ground state degeneracy is introduced naturally through the lattice and quantum mechanical effects are small. Emphasis will be placed on lattices based upon a triangular geometry. The lack of strong fluctuations (that exists in quantum systems) provides the ability to controllably tune between different ground states making this route a potential means of creating new switching devices or novel memory storage systems. The proposal aims to investigate classically frustrated magnets and ferroelectrics. These systems can be described within a common framework and will be studied using scattering techniques to provide a bulk real space image of the ground state. The properties will be tuned with magnetic and electric fields supplying a direct route for discovering a new route towards technologically applicable materials. The combined approach of investigating ferroelectrics and magnets will result in a complete understanding applicable to immediate industrial applications. These new materials will lead to the discovery of new phases including new high temperature multiferroics, classical spin liquids, or localized controllable boundaries or defects.

There is mounting evidence that deficits in saccadic and smooth pursuit eye movements are characteristic of dementia. These deficits can be detected in a lab or clinical setting using specialised eye-tracking equipment but this is inconvenient for the patient, costly for the NHS and introduces the risk of sampling bias because clinic visits are inevitably intermittent. The aim of the Monitoring Of Dementia using Eye Movements (MODEM) project is to enable the longitudinal collection of data at low cost and with minimal inconvenience, to provide a novel platform for prognosis and diagnosis of dementia. We propose to tackle monitoring of disease progression with in-home eye tracking and computational analysis of eye movement embedded with patients' everyday activity. This is an entirely novel approach, and hence high risk. However, it has the potential to lead to major breakthroughs, for three reasons: (i) Eye movement and cognitive health are closely linked, including initial evidence of markers for dementia diagnosis. (ii) Eye trackers are on the verge of a step change from lab instrument to widely deployed sensor, and their adoption for contact-less health monitoring is becoming a realistic proposition. (iii) People/patients use their eyes in daily routines that are visually engaging, and that present rich contexts for collection of information about how their eye movement changes over time, as a function of disease progression. Our vision is that rather than patients having to attend a clinic or laboratory, eye movement data can be collected in settings where the technology is ambient and peoples' behaviour is relaxed and natural. The target settings are peoples' own homes and care homes. Eye trackers can be placed strategically to observe eye movement in the context of everyday tasks. For example they can be used to track hand-eye coordination in routine tasks such as tea-making for possible signs of change; these might signal cognitive decline long before routines become more obviously affected. Eye trackers can also be deployed interactively. People spend significant amounts of their daily lives as consumers of visual media, especially through TV, which affords interactive stimulation of eye movement. For example, content (e.g. TV programmes) can be designed to elicit behaviours of interest for diagnosis. People can also be provided with active gaze controls for interaction, for instance as alternative to remote control functions of a TV. Use of gaze for control stimulates specific eye movements which can be used for testing. Though beyond the scope project, this could also lead to therapeutic application of the technology. Moreover, as eye trackers are based on cameras and computer vision, this opens up avenues for integration with other vision-based approaches such as analysis of facial expressions, for multimodal cognitive health analysis.