Rate My Professor Simon Cornish

Professor Simon Cornish is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Durham University, where he has been based since transferring his Royal Society University Research Fellowship there in 2004. He was promoted to Reader in 2008 and to full Professor in 2013. Cornish graduated with first-class honours in Physics from Keble College, Oxford, in 1994. He completed his DPhil at Linacre College, Oxford, working on laser spectroscopy of muonium with Patrick Baird and Pat Sandars. After his doctorate, he held a Lindemann Fellowship at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, collaborating with Carl Wieman on Bose-Einstein condensation. He returned to Oxford in 2001 as a postdoctoral researcher with Chris Foot and was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Brasenose College. In 2002, he secured the Royal Society University Research Fellowship. His career has focused on advancing experimental techniques in ultracold quantum gases, establishing a world-leading research group at Durham specializing in ultracold molecules.

Cornish's research interests encompass Bose-Einstein condensation, bright matter-wave solitons, applications of neutral atoms and molecules to quantum simulation and precision measurement, two-species quantum degenerate gases, ultracold atomic collisions and Feshbach resonances, and ultracold molecules. Key publications include 'Stable Bose-Einstein Condensates with Widely Tunable Interactions' (Physical Review Letters, 2000), 'Dynamics of collapsing and exploding Bose–Einstein condensates' (Nature, 2001), 'Formation of Bright Matter-Wave Solitons during the Collapse of Attractive Bose-Einstein Condensates' (Physical Review Letters, 2006), 'Creation of Ultracold Molecules in the Rovibrational Ground State' (Physical Review Letters, 2014), and recent works such as 'Long-lived entanglement of molecules in magic-wavelength optical tweezers' (2025) and quantum entanglement of molecules (Nature, 2024). His group achieved the first Bose-Einstein condensation of 85Rb near a Feshbach resonance, enabling interaction control, and was the third worldwide to produce ground-state polar molecules in 2014. Recent advances include world-record quantum coherence times in ultracold molecules, long-range dipolar interactions, and progress toward scalable quantum technologies. Cornish leads international collaborations on molecular quantum technologies and UK national quantum simulation programs.