Question: Have you ever had a large breakthrough and if so what was it, how did you discover it and when was it also, whats your cat called?

Daisy Shearer answered on 27 Mar 2022:

Science is usually very incremental but the closest to a ‘big breakthrough’ is probably a measurement I’m in the process of publishing about at the moment.

We basically measured an effect (something called ‘exchange enhancement’) in the materials I work with (quantum wells which are like a sandwich of different materials) and got some surprising results. The consensus of scientists in my field is that this effect is seen at high magnetic fields and it’s a continuous increase in energy as the field increases. But our measurement showed us that at a certain field, the effect seems to stop and we could measure an energy difference between electrons before and after the shift. This means our understanding of what was happening was probably a little bit off before and our experiment shed light on this. We have some hypotheses as to why it is a shift rather than a continuous effect that seem to agree with established theory. Hopefully, people will do the same experiment with different materials and independently find the same thing, otherwise, we probably aren’t actually measuring what we think we are. If it’s shown to be robust, then we can use this knowledge to help us make new technology.

She’s called Heidi! She’s actually our family’s cat who has lived with me for 3 years now as my parents can’t look after her at the moment. She’s 20 so I’ve known her a long time and she is the best girl ❤