skip to content

Strategic Network for Sensor Research

at Cambridge University
 

With the 2019 Nobel prizes are being announced the impact of sensor research and technology becomes apparent.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to three researchers investigating the way cells sense oxygen.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for "contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos." It recognises the theoretical work of understanding the evolution of the universe and the experimental discovery of exoplanets.

Both these fields of astronomy rely on the development of sophisticated sensors. Understanding the evolution of the universe is based on the precision measurements of temperature anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) - Nobel Prize in Physics for Arnold Penzias and Robert Wilson, 1978 - and the Doppler shifts of the electromagnetic spectra emitted by the stars. Extensive surveys of the CMB were made in the 1980s and 1990s with the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satelite observatory and later the Planck satellite which measured temperature fluctuations with an accuracy of μK.

While it was theoretically predicted that planets would orbit other stars it was first the use of spectroscopy and later intensity measurements which confirmed their existence.