Andrew Walters

Current Research Interests

Andrew has worked in a wide range of research fields in his career so far. He has studied the collective excitations of model magnetic systems in reduced dimensions using a variety of neutron scattering techniques. He has also led several studies of the role of phonons in the superconducting mechanism in novel superconductors. He has helped extend resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) to materials that historically have not been as well studied with this technique, such as graphitic materials and the actinides. More recently, Andrew has developed new software methods for simulating soft X-ray beamlines, improving the robustness and accuracy of these simulations significantly. He has also developed a program for simulating the efficiency of multilayer gratings, which are increasingly popular optical elements for tender X-ray beamlines.

Biography

After receiving First Class Honours for his MPhys degree at the University of Oxford in 2005, Andrew moved to University College London (UCL) to perform his doctoral research. In 2009 he was awarded the Marshall Stoneham Prize for outstanding postgraduate research in the Condensed Matter and Materials Physics group at UCL. After postdoctoral positions at the ID28 beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and in the Keimer group at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, he joined Diamond in 2013 as Beamline Scientist on the I21 beamline.

After participating in the design, construction, commissioning and initial user operation of the I21 beamline, Andrew moved to the Optics and Metrology Group at Diamond as Optics Scientist. There he led the development of the optical design of soft X-ray Diamond-II beamlines such as K07 and CSXID. In 2024 he joined the CSXID beamline as Senior Beamline Scientist.