 The thesis was good enough, though, for Burhop to be awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship to study at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory under Lord Rutherford in 1933. The scholarship included a first-class ticket to London on the liner RMS Oronsay. At this time the Cavendish Laboratory was one of the leading centres of physics in the world. In 1932, Cavendish laboratory scientists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split the atomic nucleus, James Chadwick discovered the neutron, and Patrick Blackett and Giuseppe Occhialini confirmed the existence of the positron. Burhop was supervised by a fellow Australian, Mark Oliphant. He was initially assigned a task of investigating the diffusion of positive alkali metal ions on hot metal surfaces, but soon switch to a more interesting subject, the measurement of the excitation function for the pairs of deuterons producing a triton through nuclear fusion:
