Scientists say the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a crucial circulation of water that helps to keep northern Europe warm, is weakening, but it struggles to make the headlines. Dr Fionagh Thomson, a Visiting Research Fellow in our Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy and Institute for Computational Cosmology, looks at Amoc’s image problem.

Professor David Alexander from our top-rated Physics Department has been elected as a trustee of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), one of the UK's leading organisations for astronomy and geophysics.

Professor Carlos Frenk – who is behind one of the foremost theories of the evolution of the Universe – has been knighted in The King’s Birthday Honours.

On May 18th 2026 the Rochester Lecture was delivered by Prof. Antoine Browaeys from Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Institut d’Optique, Paris.

Professor Stuart Adams of the Quantum Light and Matter (QLM) group at Durham Physics was the recipient of the 2020 Holweck prize, which is awarded by the French Physical Society and the Institute Of Physics. This is recognition of his pioneering work on Quantum optics.

The 2026 Rochester Lecture will take place on Monday 18 May in Lecture Theatre Ph8 of the Rochester Building. This year's speaker is Antoine Browaeys, a senior staff Scientist at CNRS. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Cachan (France) and did his ph’D under Alain Aspect at the Institut d’Optique (2000). He is working on experiments manipulating individual cold atoms and small, dense atomic clouds.

An international team of researchers led by our Physics Department is developing a new way to tackle soil degradation in sub–Saharan Africa.

Our physicists and their collaborators in Leiden are making public one of the largest datasets in cosmology, offering scientists around the world a new way to explore how the Universe evolves.

Durham physicist Professor Valery Khoze has been elected to the Academia Europaea, one of Europe’s most prestigious academic bodies. The honour recognises his outstanding contributions to theoretical particle physics and his international standing as a leading figure in the field.

New research has found that ultra-faint satellite galaxy systems orbiting our Milky Way could tell us about the conditions of the early Universe – and why some galaxies grew while others didn’t.

Our physicists have created a new movie taking us back nine billion years in time to understand the formation of our Milky Way.

Valery Khoze has been elected to the Academia Europaea, one of Europe’s most distinguished academic bodies. The honour recognises Professor Khoze’s influential contributions to theoretical particle physics, particularly in quantum field theory, quantum chromodynamics, Higgs physics, and high-energy particle interactions.