A total of 14 physics-based firms in sectors from quantum and energy to healthcare and aerospace have won 2025 Business Awards from the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World. The awards were presented at a reception in the Palace of Westminster yesterday attended by senior parliamentarians and policymakers as well as investors, funders and industry leaders.

The IOP Business Awards, which have been running since 2012, recognise the role that physics and physicists play in the economy, creating jobs and growth “by powering innovation to meet the challenges facing us today, ranging from climate change to better healthcare and food production”. More than 100 firms have now won Business Awards, with around 90% of those companies still commercially active.

The parliamentary event honouring the 2025 winners were hosted by Dave Robertson, the Labour MP for Lichfield, who spent 10 years as a physics teacher in Birmingham before working for teaching unions. There was also a speech from Baron Sharma, who studied applied physics before moving into finance and later becoming a Conservative MP, Cabinet minister and president of the COP-26 climate summit.

Seven firms were awarded 2025 IOP Business Innovation Awards, which recognize companies that have “delivered significant economic and/or societal impact through the application of physics”. They include Oxford-based Tokamak Energy, which has developed “compact, powerful, robust, quench-resilient” high-temperature superconducting magnets for commercial fusion energy and for  propulsion systems, accelerators and scientific instruments.

Oxford Instruments was honoured for developing a novel analytical technique for scanning electron microscopes, enabling new capabilities and accelerating time to results by at least an order of magnitude. Ionoptika, meanwhile, was recognized for developing Q-One, which is a new generation of focused ion-beam instrumentation, providing single atom through to high-dose nanoscale advanced materials engineering for photonic and quantum technologies.

The other four winners were: electronics firm FlexEnable for their organic transistor materials; Lynkeos Technology for the development of muonography in the nuclear industry; the renewable energy company Sunamp for their thermal storage system; and the defence and security giant Thales UK for the development of a solid-state laser for laser rangefinders.

Business potential

Six other companies have won an IOP Start-up Award, which celebrates young companies “with a great business idea founded on a physics invention, with the potential for business growth and significant societal impact”. They include Astron Systems for developing “long-lifetime turbomachinery to enable multi-reuse small rocket engines and bring about fully reusable small launch vehicles”, along with MirZyme Therapeutics for “pioneering diagnostics and therapeutics to eliminate preeclampsia and transform maternal health”.

The other four winners were: Celtic Terahertz Technology for a metamaterial filter technology; Nellie Technologies for a algae-based carbon removal technology; Quantum Science for their development of short-wave infrared quantum dot technology; and Wayland Additive for the development and commercialisation of charge-neutralised electron beam metal additive manufacturing.

James McKenzie, a former vice-president for business at the IOP, who was involved in judging the awards, says that all awardees are “worthy winners”. “It’s the passion, skill and enthusiasm that always impresses me,” McKenzie told Physics World.

iFAST Diagnostics were also awarded the IOP Lee Lucas Award that recognises early-stage companies taking innovative products into the medical and healthcare sector. The firm, which was spun out of the University of Southampton, develops blood tests that can test the treatment of bacterial infections in a matter of hours rather than days. They are expecting to have approval for testing next year.

“Especially inspiring was the team behind iFAST,” adds McKenzie, “who developed a method to test very rapid tests cutting time from 48 hours to three hours, so patients can be given the right antibiotics.”

“The award-winning businesses are all outstanding examples of what can be achieved when we build upon the strengths we have, and drive innovation off the back of our world-leading discovery science,” noted Tom Grinyer, IOP chief executive officer. “In the coming years, physics will continue to shape our lives, and we have some great strengths to build upon here in the UK, not only in specific sectors such as quantum, semiconductors and the green economy, but in our strong academic research and innovation base, our growing pipeline of spin-out and early-stage companies, our international collaborations and our growing venture capital community.”

For the full list of winners, see here.

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Fermilab has officially opened a new building named after the particle physicist Helen Edwards. Officials from the lab and the US Department of Energy (DOE) opened the Helen Edwards Engineering Research Center at a ceremony held on 5 December.  The new building is the lab’s largest purpose-built lab and office space since the lab’s iconic Wilson Hall, which was completed in 1974.

Construction of the Helen Edwards Engineering Research Center began in 2019 and was completed three years later. The centre is an 7500 m² multi-story lab and office building that is adjacent and connected to Wilson Hall.

The new centre is designed as a collaborative lab where engineers, scientists and technicians design, build and test technologies across several areas of research such as neutrino science, particle detectors, quantum science and electronics.

The centre also features cleanrooms, vibration-sensitive labs and cryogenic facilities in which the components of the near detector for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment will be assembled and tested.

A pioneering spirit

With a PhD in experimental particle physics from Cornell University, Edwards was heavily involved with commissioning the university’s 10 GeV electron synchrotron. In 1970 Fermilab’s director Robert Wilson appointed Edwards as associate head of the lab’s booster section and she later became head of the accelerator division.

While at Fermilab, Edwards’ primary responsibility was designing, constructing, commissioning and operating the Tevatron, which led to the discoveries of the top quark in 1995 and the tau neutrino in 2000.

Edwards retired in the early 1990s but continued to work as guest scientists at Fermilab and officially switched the Tevatron off during a ceremony held on 30 September 2011. Edwards died in 2016.

Darío Gil, the undersecretary for science at the DOE says that Edwards’ scientific work “is a symbol of the pioneering spirit of US research”.

“Her contributions to the Tevatron and the lab helped the US become a world leader in the study of elementary particles,” notes Gil. “We honour her legacy by naming this research centre after her as Fermilab continues shaping the next generation of research using [artificial intelligence], [machine learning] and quantum physics.”

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