• Question: what kind of experiments are you doing to explore the thing you are working to wards

    Asked by anon-240507 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 16 Mar 2020. This question was also asked by anon-241089.
    • Photo: Ben Cropper

      Ben Cropper answered on 16 Mar 2020:

      My experiment that I will use for my final report (thesis) is done, and the lab that we did it at is now shut down! We fired protons (1 proton 0 neutrons), deuterons (1 proton 1 neutron) and helium 3 nuclei (2 protons 1 neutron) at foils made each of cadmium and tin isotopes.
      This was to study the nuclear properties of cadmium and tin, which would help to understand an interesting type of nuclear decay that is theorised to happen (we haven’t seen it, the half life is at least a million times the age of the universe). Cadmium-116 is theorised to decay into tin-116 by something known as neutrinoless double-beta decay, and if we saw it it would prove that the neutrino (a small particle that doesn’t really interact with anything) is its own antimatter!

    • Photo: Tom Dally

      Tom Dally answered on 16 Mar 2020:

      My current research is focused on whether we can use weather radar systems (like the ones the Met Office uses) to monitor insect communities across the UK, trying to create a weather map for insect activity over the whole country. We’re testing this using weather balloons. We send up large weather balloons, 1000m up into the air, and attach large nets at different heights long the line that tethers the balloon to the ground. We use these nets to catch insects at different altitudes in the atmosphere so that we can test whether the size diversity and number of insects in the air matches the size diversity and number of “insects” seen on weather radar scans.

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