A new home for the Cavendish Lab

The Ray Dolby Centre, formerly known as the Cavendish 3, was officially opened on 9 May after years of building and preparation, just across the road from the previous Cavendish Lab on Cambridge University's West Cambridge Site.

The Cavendish is a world-famous institution with a storied history stretching back to figures like Thompson and Rutherford. It's also where I did my PhD in ultracold atom physics from 2016-2020, at which point the Cavendish 3 was still a distant promise. My old experiment was one of the ones that was moved between buildings, and I must admit I'm glad I wasn't still around to organise that painstaking procedure. Optical tables weren't meant to move!

The original Cavendish was in the city centre, where it stayed for a hundred years from 1874 to 1974 before moving much further out to a new set of buildings with more space. The original site is still marked with a picture of a crocodile, supposedly representing Rutherford's prickly personality. The 70s campus with its prefab buildings is the Cavendish I knew, and despite its unremarkable looks it remained just as vibrant a hub of innovation and cutting-edge research as it had ever been.

Now, another 50 years later, the Cavendish will have a new home once again, and it will be exciting to see what new discoveries and inventions emerge in the coming years, especially as the centre's design is meant to encourage mingling and cross-pollination between different research fields. Cambridge University is one of many reasons why Cambridge is such a fantastic place to be a patent attorney, and the Cavendish is a big part of that!

The formal opening of the Ray Dolby Centre also marks a significant milestone in the development of the Cambridge West Innovation District, home to the University’s world-leading research in physics, engineering, and computer science. Purpose-built for innovation and discovery, it brings together a community of the brightest minds to solve some of the world’s most complex problems.

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