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Asked by anon-253576 on 12 May 2020.
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Harry Keen answered on 12 May 2020:
Right now I’m working on understanding what certain materials do under pressure (when they’re squashed). Think of being at the bottom of the ocean, you have all the weight of the water above and around you squishing you. Or for a more extreme example, at the centre of the earth, with the weight of the whole earth compressing you!
When put under these types of conditions, materials can go through all sorts of strange phase transitions. One material that I’m working of goes from being an insulator to conductor, and what’s especially weird is that it also gets longer along one direction. You don’t normally expect things to get bigger when you try to squash them! I’m trying to understand why this happens with quantum mechanics simulations on one of the worlds biggest supercomputers 🙂
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Susan Cartwright answered on 12 May 2020:
I study neutrinos, which it’s fair to say are the most difficult of the known elementary particles to study! The reason is that they ineract only extremely weakly, which makes them extremely hard to detect: if you want to detect something, it has to interact with your detector, and most neutrinos simply go straight through. The Sun emits huge numbers of neutrinos – 65 billion of them got through each square centimetre of the Earth every second – but you need to have a very large detector (many tons) to see even a few of them.
“Why bother?” you ask (quite reasonably!). The reason is that neutrinos have many weird properties, and some of those weird properties may just explain why it is that the universe is composed entirely of matter – not the 50-50 mix of matter and antimatter than we get when we create particles in the lab. This is one of the great questions of cosmology that’s been puzzling us for half a century, so it is exciting to think that our neutrino experiments may help to answer it.
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Enrico De Vita answered on 12 May 2020:
I am researching how to get estimates of the levels of brain chemicals (neurotransmitters and metabolites) of the living fetal brain (while the fetus in is mum’s belly), with MRI, e.g. completely non invasively, with no harmful radiation and without inserting needles or other substances
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Kerrianne Harrington answered on 12 May 2020:
I research optical fibres that are hollow. Optical fibres are like ‘wires’ for light, and are used in lots of places, like for carrying data (like how we use the internet!), biomedical devices, making lasers, sensing in manufacturing and more. Hollow core fibres are a recent type of novel optical fibre that bring a lot of promise, so I am investigating how we can splice and implement them into lots of kinda of systems.
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Malgorzata Drwila answered on 12 May 2020:
I’m studying the way the seismic waves go through the Earth. Waves are generated by humans on the land or sea surface and as they travel down, bounce on different structures underground and coming back to the surface they are being recorded. The times of recordings are crucial and can tell us a lot about how the Earth looks inside.
My job is to process those recordings (remove noise, calculate depths of structures, place recording in correct position) to create a faithful model of the first few kilometres of the Earth’s crust. I also research implementation of AI into traditional workflows.
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Sarah Appleby answered on 12 May 2020:
At the moment I’m researching the material around galaxies, which is mostly gas and dust. Galaxies can grow by pulling in some of this material and can also spit it back out, for example when stars go supernova! So astronomers think that by studying it, we can build up a fossil record of everything that has happened to a galaxy. Hopefully this can help explain why galaxies such as our Milky Way look the way they do today.
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Holly Campbell answered on 12 May 2020: last edited 12 May 2020 1:15 pm
My research is all about how different forms of radiation affect the properties of superconductors. Superconductors are incredible materials which allow electrical currents to flow through them with zero resistance, while at the same time generating huge magnetic fields. These properties are exploited in nuclear fusion reactors where the superconductors are used to ignite nuclear fusion of hydrogen, sustain fusion reactions and control the movement of the plasma. However, inside fusion reactors, the superconductors are exposed to high energy radiation which damages the superconductor and reduces its current-carrying and thus magnetic field-generating properties.
It is my job to study the changes in the superconducting properties after irradiation in order to find materials which are more resistant to the radiation. Finding what are known as radiation-hard materials (materials which are less affected by radiation) will be vital in the construction of commercial nuclear fusion reactors. -
Scott Lawrie answered on 12 May 2020: last edited 12 May 2020 1:38 pm
I work with particle accelerators. These are machines that breaks apart molecules and atoms, before giving them lots of energy to make them whiz along close to the speed of light. I actually work at the very start of the accelerator where the particles are made, called an ‘ion source’. On my accelerator, the ion source is pretty old-fashioned, so I’m making a much more modern, powerful ion source which will make more particles and last longer while doing it. It’s a bit like going from old-fashioned filament light bulbs to modern, long-lasting LED lights 🙂
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anon answered on 12 May 2020:
My last project was the atmosphere of Saturn. It turned out to have a belt around equator that is very, very good at conducting currents!
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Lori-Ann Foley answered on 12 May 2020:
I am studying the climate and weather on Mars. It is really interesting because Mars is a desert planet today but in the past, when the planets were all much younger, Earth and Mars were very similar. Mars would have had flowing water and may even have had an ocean! But that all evaporated. We wondered where the water went and know some of it escaped into space. But some is still at the poles in ice caps (like on Earth) and we are finding out now that lots of it is frozen as glaciers, but they are covered in sand and dust. So I want to know why Mars changed and how. To do this I run weather programmes like the forecasters use for Earth. But mine are changed to show how the weather is on Mars. It is really interesting.
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Anne Green answered on 12 May 2020:
I’m trying to understand what dark matter is. By observing how stars and galaxies move and cluster we’ve deduced that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible. It also has to be exotic-some new particle that we’ve not yet found (or possibly exotic black holes, made just after the Big Bang).
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Particle Physicists have some good ideas about what the dark matter could be. One possibility is Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs for short. Their properties are exactly what their name says. They’re heavy, weight similar to an atom or heavier, and interact only weakly with each other and normal matter. They are a consequence of particle physics models which have been invented for other reasons (and not just to produce dark matter).
–There are lots of experiments underway trying to detect WIMPs, either directly, when they interact with normal matter, or indirectly via the particles produced when 2 WIMP come together. The signals expected in these experiments depend on how the dark matter is distributed in our Milky Way galaxy.
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I’m a theoretical astroparticle physicist. I don’t do experiments myself. I work closely with experimental particle physicists, helping them design their experiments, making predictions for what they should see/measure and using their results to understand the properties of dark matter (how heavy is it? how do the particles interact with each other and normal matter?). -
Ashleigh Barron answered on 12 May 2020:
I work for an engineering company developing laser for different military applications mainly laser range finders. It takes a lot of money to develop new products in companies so what we tend to do is keep the same laser and change bits slightly to improve it to use in different products. At the moment I’m trying to see what is stopping getting more energy out of the laser with the hope of fixing this. Most of my work is problems solving, finding out what is wrong with something and fixing it rather than researching new physics theories like you do in universities. This is quite different to what I did for my PhD research where I made a device that held E-coli cells in a grid using only light. I used a special optical fibre with 4 cores (4 channels the light can go down), that I melted the end to make into a lens which created interference patterns like a grid and used this to hold cells.
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Ry Cutter answered on 12 May 2020:
I currently have two main research interests:
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The first is using a big telescope to find the explosion from colliding black holes and neutron stars! These explosions are called kilonovae, they’re very red because of something called the r-process!
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The second is developing a theory on how magnetic white dwarfs suck in dust from torn up planets and asteroids! This helps explains how white dwarfs get polluted.
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Good question,
Ry -
Marios Kalomenopoulos answered on 12 May 2020:
I’m studying how gravitational waves travel in the universe!
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GWs are like E/M waves (in most cases), and you can think of them as waves that “transport” information about changes in gravity! One of the most famous source of these GWs are the collisions of black holes, which are the majority of the detected signals so far.
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Now, most of these sources are relatively close, so the GWs don’t travel large distances to come to us. But future detectors would have higher sensitivity and would be able to observe GWs from further away.
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And this is where the interesting part begins. Since these waves have to travel for longer time, there is a higher probability of something happening to them! They can hit an object, or they can change their trajectory because of the gravitational pull of a massive object. Or maybe there could be effects due to theories that are beyond our standard models!
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In my research, we try to find out how all these things can affect the GW signals we observe and what can we learn for them by observing GWs! -
Paula Koelemeijer answered on 13 May 2020:
At the moment, I am looking at how the governmental lockdowns due to coronavirus are reflected in our observations of seismic noise! Seismic data (vibrations travelling through the Earth) are recorded all the time and we can see the influence of all kinds of human activities in these (car traffic, buses, trains, etc). Now a lot of activity has stopped, we notice that it is quieter, everywhere around the globe! This is useful for when we want to pick up natural signals (earthquakes, tsunamis, etc).
What I particularly like about this, is that it is not my normal research: I normally use seismology to study the deep Earth. But because the physics of how the seismic waves travel remains the same, it is easy to study very different things!
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Roan Haggar answered on 13 May 2020:
I research big groups of galaxies, called galaxy clusters. These clusters are some of the biggest things in the Universe, and I’m trying to learn how they form, and how they change over time.
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However, it takes billions of years for these clusters to grow, so we can’t just look through our telescopes and watch them change! To study them, I use computer simulations, which allow us to rewind time and see what these clusters looked like billions of years ago, and how they’ve evolved over their lifetimes. -
Krishna Mooroogen answered on 13 May 2020:
At the moment I’m working on some research I started a while ago, on sunspots! I’m trying to understand how energy changes around sunspots by looking at the waves that generated there.
I am also working on understanding how we can use sensors on vehicles to measure pollution and also damage to roads.
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Gabriel Gallardo answered on 20 May 2020:
I’m looking for “dark matter” which is invisible stuff that floats about in the universe. We don’t know what it is or where it comes from, but we know it’s there! In my experiment we try to make dark matter and study its properties.
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Sophia Pells answered on 22 May 2020:
I’m studying different radioactive atoms that can be used to treat or image cancer. Some radioactive atoms emit particles of radiation (like alphas or betas) and these can be used to kill cancer cells to help treat cancer. Some other radioactive atoms (or sometimes the same ones) emit waves of radiation called gamma rays and we can use use them to track where cancer is in someone’s body. It’s really useful if we can do both at once so we can treat a patient’s cancer and also use imaging to check that we are killing all the cancer cells and not hurting healthy parts of the body.
I’m studying some radioactive atoms that haven’t really been used in people before but may be better for certain jobs than ones that are used at the moment. I am studying ways that we can produce these atoms and ways we can test how good they are at treating or imaging cancer.
Comments
David commented on :
I am looking at whether the tax on soft drinks led to changes in the amount of sugary drinks people bought. There was evidence to suggest that sugary drinks are bad for us and so to try and encourage people to drink less the price was increased. It is important for us to see if the tax makes a difference because if it doesn’t then we need to think of different ways to encourage people to drink less.
Luke commented on :
I am interested in Bacteria and how they cause disease and interact with their environment. I think its super interesting that somethings so small can do so much to help us (Yogurt, Cheese, Beer, some Breads etc) but can also cause so many problems eg disease