• Question: What was your most fun experiment and what was it and when?

    Asked by anon-323376 on 20 Mar 2022. This question was also asked by anon-322226, anon-322243.
    • Photo: Sarah Mann

      Sarah Mann answered on 20 Mar 2022:

      That’s a great question! I love doing all sorts of experiements but my favourite was probably my first big experiment back in 2019.
      I spent a year building a detector and then I finally got to test it on a neutron beam. The suspense was really building! In these kind of experiments things never work perfectly right away, so you have to spend some time replacing cables and making sure everything is aligned. Finally it was time to see if my detector worked, and seeing the results come in was so exciting! I’m pretty sure I was jumping up and down when I realised it was actually working. I could see from the data coming in that the detector that I’d built could cope with a higher count rate of neutrons than the current standard detectors, so I was very happy.
      In the same experiement I was also able to use this detector I’d built to measure how far apart the atoms in a certain material are, which I find incredible! I had to work very late that night but it was definitely worth it as it was really rewarding and so much fun!

    • Photo: Andrew Owens

      Andrew Owens answered on 22 Mar 2022:

      Whilst I was studying in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was able to image DNA “capture” by synthetic polypeptides (a type of protein strand)!

      I first produced positively charged polypeptide strands using genetically modified bacteria. I then mixed these strands with fluorescently labelled DNA (DNA that lights up under a fluorescent microscope). Finally, I heated the mixture under the microscope. The negatively charged polypeptides bonded to the DNA and when heated, coalesced into a small sphere, pulling the DNA in with it.

      I am proud of this because it was work at the cutting edge of the field, and these results were new research.

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 24 Mar 2022: last edited 24 Mar 2022 10:33 am

      A few years ago, I went to the Netherlands to do an experiment using some of the most powerful superconducting electromagnets in the world! It was really fun to meet other scientists in my field there and collaborate with them. The measurement we did was basically putting an electrical current across a device (something called a ‘quantum well’ which is basically a sandwich of different materials and causes electrons to behave like they’re in a 2D space rather than 3D) and then applying HUGE magnetic fields (up to 15T) because this reveals how a property called ‘electron spin’ changes. The measurement was at a really low temperature of -268.15 so the experiment needed lots of liquid nitrogen and liquid helium to cool the device down. Our measurement directly observed an effect that has only been inferred in the past so it was really exciting to validate how electrons behave in these materials.

      Here’s a photo of one of the magnets I got to work with (the big tank is liquid nitrogen and the magnet is actually underneath the floor in this lab! My device was put in one of those long sticks and lowered under the floor into the magnetic field):
      HFML_2

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