• Question: what is your specialty

    Asked by gramton to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by abdullah, 11wiloma, 11benmor, 11andgra, mousetrap, elliemaecarmichael, blackheb, simran10.
    • Photo: James Boone

      James Boone answered on 9 Mar 2012:

      My subject speciality is graphite, a carbon based material used in both pencils and nuclear reactors! I study graphite for EDF energy who are in charge of the nuclear reactors in this country. The graphite in a nuclear reactor is used to slow down particles called neutrons to maintain a steady fission chain reaction in the Uranium fuel. It does this by the mechanism of collisions with the crystal lattice, which gradually damages the graphite and it’s my job to model possible damage types.

    • Photo: Robert Thompson

      Robert Thompson answered on 9 Mar 2012:

      Like James I also look at carbon based materials, but for quite a different reason. I’m looking at materials we can use for future electronics and gadgets. We call them “Organic materials” which just means we make them out of Carbon instead of the stuff electronics are made from at the moment. (If someone asks me I’ll tell you a bit more about Organic materials another time.)

      I look at them mainly by firing Lasers at them and seeing what happens and also looking at them in lots of detail with some pretty awesomely expensive microscopes that show me things 500000 smaller than the width of your hair.

    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 9 Mar 2012:

      My particular interest is ultracold atoms, atoms that are cooled to temperatures colder than outer space. When atoms get this cold, they start to form really weird new types of matter and behave in unusual ways. My own work is mostly in Bose-Einstein condensates, which are made when millions of atoms start to behave as if they were one giant atom. I figure out the best ways to describe these atoms using maths, and figure out how to manipulate these atoms to do what we want.

      In my previous job, I was looking at whirlpools in these Bose-Einstein condensates and I figured out a way to make the whirlpools flow clockwise and anticlockwise at the same time, which was a lot of fun. Now I’m looking at using Bose-Einstein condensates as a kind of quantum bubble wrap, trying to protect quantum information.

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      My area of research is a technique called coherent diffractive imaging. This involves exposing various types of samples to high power X-rays, about a billion times more powerful than those at hospitals, to try and capture an image known as a ‘speckle pattern’. This pattern is a series of dots and can be used to determine an objects shape. By imaging using X-rays we can see things much smaller than with visible light, it’s even possible to see atoms.
      For myself and my team our biggest challenge is actually placing our samples into the path of the X-rays. As molecules go biological molecules are fairly flimsy and cannot tolerate multiple exposures to high power X-rays. Because of that we’ve had to develop systems that can rapidly replace samples so we can take many images.

    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      I’ve done several things in my life as a scientist. During my PhD I worked on quantum computing. This relies on some of the weirder properties of quantum physics – that a data bit can be in two states at once. I was also working on atoms trapped in cages of 60 carbon atoms – tiny structures. We’d put those into tiny carbon tubes to make “peapods” – atoms in cages in a tube a few atoms across!

      For four years I was a Medical Physicist – using light to try to detect disease. The other thing I did was to treat illness using lasers and a special kind of drug. These drugs do nothing normally but when you shine light on them, they become very reactive. This means you can give a patient this drug and shine a light on a particular part of their body to kill the diseased cells just in that area.

      Now I work in a department of architecture and planning – and I use what I’ve learned in physics and maths to try to understand how people use cities. This could be transport, poverty, education or a number of other things – and I’m still learning how I can make myself useful!

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