The fellowship will support the completion of a book, titled 'How Does Speech Timing Work?'. Speakers manipulate speech sound durations for a variety of meaning-related purposes. This book will discuss the kinds of timing patterns people produce when they speak, and will evaluate theories of how speech articulation is controlled to produce these timing patterns. Because speech timing patterns are often termed rhythmic, it will also discuss available definitions of speech rhythm, and will evaluate rhythmicity claims for speech against available evidence. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in how speech production works, including linguists, psycholinguists, motor control specialists, speech technologists, and speech therapists.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

This project uses two novel inputs to address the fundamental problem of understanding observed variability and change in the Atlantic Ocean in the context of the global coupled atmosphere-ocean system. Using a combination of large-ensemble perturbed-physics experiments made possible with distributed computing and new adjoint-based estimates of the recent ocean state together with uncertainty therein, we aim to identify free-running versions of an atmosphere-ocean general circulation model that, for the first time, actually reproduce the full evolution of the large-scale climate system over the past 15 years. The ensemble of such models will provide unique insights into the origins, nature and predictability of recent changes in ocean state, together with a valuable tool for assessing future predictability and the risk of substantial Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation changes in the longer term. Coupled models currently used both for decadal prediction and longer-term projections of the response to changing boundary conditions typically rely on the comparison of model anomalies from the model climatology with observed anomalies from some estimate of the 'real world' climatology. This is a fundamental problem when either (a) the response to external forcing is uncertain and comparable to any predictability that may arise from the initial state or (b) the system contains significant non-linearities that are likely to impact on any forecast. We will use an entirely novel approach to initialising coupled models directly from a state-of-the-art ocean analysis, using direct perturbation of coupled model parameters to find model-versions that track the real world over the past 15 years. This very challenging objective is made feasible by the unprecedented computing resources, allowing multi-thousand-member ensembles with a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, provided by distributed computing. Our approach will be to initialize tens to hundreds of thousands of perturbed versions of two AOGCMs from the ECCOc ocean analysis, perturbed to allow for both observational and structural uncertainty, estimated from the discrepancies between ECCOc and other analyses. We will use the statistical techniques of likelihood profiling and importance sampling to identify parameter/analysis combinations that allow models to continue to 'shadow' the analysis initially for six months and subsequently, as we home in on promising perturbations, out to the full 15 years. The models used will be HadCM3, which is already set up for distributed computing applications, and a new model based on coupling the HadAM3P model to the MITgcm used in the ECCOc analysis, exploiting information on the parameter-sensitivities of both models that is already available from past ensemble experiments and (in the case of the MITgcm) from the model adjoint. Successful model-versions will then be run free over the full 20th century (for HadCM3) or from 1975 onward (for HadAM3P/MITgcm) to assess the range of AMOC trends they generate in response to total external forcing and anthropogenic forcing only over the past two decades. They will also provide an range of initial conditions for an ensemble prediction experiment to be performed by the VALOR consortium. In addition to its scientific benefits, this project will provide a significant public outreach opportunity, allowing participants to see RAPID data being used directly to address problems of clear and immediate concern.

Optical coatings are key components within almost all technology that surrounds us from our glasses to cameras. Extreme-performance coatings are used in optical atomic clocks and gravitaitonal-wave detectors which are the most sensitive clocks and distance meters ever built. Optical coatings are also essential for industrial applications in photonics, particularly for miniaturisation of laser diode devices and for increasing the laser damage threshold. Optical coatings consist of alternating layers of materials with different refractive indices and are only a few micrometers thick. Their performance is determined by the amount of light scattered and absorbed inside the coating and by their thermal noises caused by the Brownian motion of the atoms. Optical coatings can be manufactured out of a large variety of materials, such as tantalum oxide, silica, and amorphous silicon. However, the ultimate properties of the coatings depend both on the intrinsic properties of these materials and on the manufacturing process. Therefore, it is essential to have a robust experiment to test novel coatings for precision instruments. We propose to build an internationally-leading facility to directly measure the properties of novel optical coatings. This proposal emanates from two recent findings. First, the MIT LIGO group found that coating samples can be measured in one week using a multimode optical resonator. Second, groups in academia in the UK, USA, and Germany developed a new class of promising extreme-performance coatings for applications in precision measurements. The proposed centre is a crucial step in commercial manufacturing of high-quality coatings since we need to experimentally explore the whole parameter space of coating production, such as deposition rate, doping materials, and annealing temperature. The key idea of the proposed experiment is to embed a coating sample in the optical resonator and measure its properties using three co-resonating beams. This setup will make all displacement noises common to these beams, except for the coating thermal noises. The main advantage of the proposed facility is that it can test one coating sample per week at the telecom laser wavelength and has the potential to be the first in the world working with extreme-performance coatings in this parameter space. The centre will be able to directly measure coating samples for future optical atomic clocks, next generation of gravitational-wave detectors, fundamental physics experiments and for the commercial applications.

Self-assembly provides the ability to create well-controlled nanostructures with electronic or chemical functionality and enables the synthesis of a wide range of useful devices. Diblock copolymers self-assemble into periodic arrays of microdomains with feature sizes of typically 10-50 nm, and have been used as self-assembled 'resists' to define periodic patterns useful in making a wide range of devices such as silicon capacitors and transistors, photonic crystals, and patterned magnetic media. However, the lamellar, cylindrical or spherical microdomains in diblock copolymers generally form grating patterns, or close packed structures with hexagonal symmetry. This limitation in pattern geometries restricts their device applications, making it desirable to create self-assembled patterns with a wider range of geometries and applications. The intellectual merit of this proposal is the development of triblock terpolymers which form thin films with a diverse range of geometries. The work includes design of triblock terpolymers to form films with specific geometries such as widely or closely-spaced lines, lines with specific edge modulations, junctions, or bends, or arrays of cylinders or spheres in non-close-packed arrangements; synthesis of polymers with appropriate block chemistry, interactions and volume fractions; understanding processing effects including substrate treatment and annealing processes; modeling the self-assembly; and generation of magnetic nanoparticles within one block to form functional nanostructures directly. Central to this work is an investigation of templating of triblock terpolymers using substrate chemistry and topography, so that the self-assembly can be guided to nanoscale precision. The work is a collaboration between a group in Bristol, UK, with experience in the synthetic chemistry of triblock terpolymers, and a group in MIT, Cambridge MA, with experience in block copolymer lithography and templating.