The UK is producing physics PhDs who cannot compete internationally—and this centre aims to fix that. Condensed matter physics underpins everything from smartphone screens to solar panels, but British graduates have been losing out to better-trained rivals abroad. An international review in 2005 confirmed what employers had been saying for years: UK PhD training in this field lacks rigour. This Doctoral Training Centre will create a fully internationally benchmarked programme, combining theory and experiment to produce graduates who can move fluidly between disciplines. If it succeeds, the impact will be felt across the economy. Companies from Unilever to Toshiba, from energy firms to patent law offices, have signed up as industrial associates. They want graduates who can adapt when a technological shift makes vocational training obsolete. The centre will supply the UK with a generation of physicists who can advance the field itself and also strengthen engineering, biophysics, photonics, chemistry, and materials science. It is a bet on core skills as the foundation for tomorrow's interdisciplinary breakthroughs.
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The theme area of this Centre is core-discipline Condensed Matter Physics (CMP), a field of research that impacts on numerous technologies and other fields of science such as engineering, biophysics, photonics, chemistry and materials science. Its continued ability to do so requires the production of people who have received internationally leading training in its core intellectual tools, both theoretical and experimental. Many of our colleagues world-wide have commented to us over the years (and some in their letters of support for this Centre) that the lack of rigour of our PhD training disfavours our graduates in the international market-place. It was therefore no surprise to hear these sentiments echoed by the 2005 International Review of Physics. A DTC in CMP with a fully internationally benchmarked training component will rectify this deficit, and enable us to provide the UK with a generation of CMP staff who will both advance the field itself and contribute to many other fields of interdisciplinary science and technology.National need for the graduates that we will produce is high, as demonstrated by the large number of support letters provided by companies and organisations who wish to be formally affiliated with our DTC as Industrial Associates. We draw particular attention to the range of disciplines covered by these companies. In addition to the scientific consultancies such as Detica and manufacturers of scientific equipment such as Oxford Instruments and e2v, who would be expected to be among our core users , the list includes scientific publishers, software houses, companies small and large from the energy sector, large multinationals such as Unilever and Toshiba Europe, and representatives of the finance and patent law sectors. This evinces a key attraction of graduates possessing the high-level core skills that ours will have: they possess a discipline-hopping ability prized by employers in a world where years of vocational training can sometimes be undermined very quickly by a technological or intellectual paradigm shift. As the UK embarks on this adventurous DTC scheme it is therefore vital that centres like this which will advance core skills are created. In doing so, we will be laying the foundations for tomorrow's interdisciplinarity, and therefore complementing the support of today's.
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