Two Imperial physicists awarded prestigious Ernest Rutherford Fellowships

Dr Benedikt Maier and Dr Brendan Kettle are among seven researchers awarded STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowships.

The Fellowship is one of the UK’s flagship schemes for supporting early-career researchers in particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics. This year’s programmes will support researchers across the UK, backed by £6 million of funding, to establish their own research programmes and develop their careers as independent scientists.  

The Imperial awardees are among a cohort whose research spans topics ranging from dark matter and gravitational waves to planetary science and black holes. 

New approaches to the dark matter mystery

Dr Benedikt Maier, from Imperial’s Department of Physics, will use his fellowship to investigate new approaches to searching for dark matter using the CMS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, one of the world’s largest particle physics experiments. His project aims to introduce AI-driven techniques into real-time data selection systems, improving sensitivity to potential dark matter signals that current search methods may miss.  

By advancing data acquisition and analysis techniques for both the current Large Hadron Collider and its future upgrade, the research aims to expand the range of dark matter scenarios that can be explored experimentally. 

Developing next-generation X-ray sources

Dr Brendan Kettle was also awarded his Ernest Rutherford Fellowship while at Imperial’s Department of Physics. 

His project focuses on advanced X-ray sources based on laser-plasma accelerators, which can generate ultrafast X-ray pulses around 1,000 times shorter than those produced by conventional facilities. These extremely short bursts allow researchers to observe processes occurring on the timescale of electron motion.

The fellowship will support efforts to improve performance, stability and spectral quality of these sources while demonstrating their use in applications spanning physics, materials science and industry. The work could help make advanced X-ray technologies even more widely accessible and enable new approaches to studying extreme environments including planetary interiors and fusion plasmas. The technology could provide researchers with new ways to study matter under conditions that are difficult or impossible to reproduce using conventional X-ray facilities. 

Of the award, Brendan said "I am honoured to have been awarded an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship. It offers me the fantastic opportunity to showcase the extraordinary capabilities of laser-plasma accelerator X-ray sources.

The 5 year project will allow me to develop these sources into a more mature scientific tool, and demonstrate how they can be used to make novel ultrafast measurements such as the rapid dynamics of matter in extreme conditions, as well as fulfilling the need for an accessible and compact bright ultrafast X-ray source for industry."