• Question: whats the coolest experiment u have ever performed?

    Asked by anon-240492 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 16 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Ben Cropper

      Ben Cropper answered on 16 Mar 2020:

      The coolest is probably at CERN. You can get interesting radioactive particle beams there, by slamming a load of high energy protons from the main CERN accelerator into a big lead brick. Loads of interesting nuclei come out, which you can then separate and re-accelerate to use in your experiment.

      In our case, we got some radioactive magnesium, and fired it at a plastic foil inside a big magnet that was made from a hospital MRI scanner. From there, we could see neutrons passing from the deuterium in the plastic onto the magnesium. Very cool! Usually we do it the other way round with a hydrogen beam on a target of the interesting nucleus, but magnesium-28’s half life is too short to make a target out of it!

    • Photo: Tom Dally

      Tom Dally answered on 16 Mar 2020: last edited 16 Mar 2020 10:56 pm

      During my PhD? I worked out how to identify different insect pollinators, like bees and hoverflies, using the sounds of their wing beats as they fly between flowers.
      During my undergrad degree? It was probably when I went to Peru for two months to do research on how the different ways we try to protect conservation areas can affect monkey populations (I also once genetically modified a bacterium to be lactose intolerant…)

    • Photo: Emily Goddard

      Emily Goddard answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      I loved doing experiments at Diamond in Oxford, where I can watch the atoms in my crystals move in real time (it usually takes about two hours to get ‘photograph’ of the atoms). But the one that’s got the biggest gasps from an audience (and me tbh, it still surprises me when it works!) is putting big blocks of polystyrene in acetone, like this: https://youtu.be/44NC-MOeWk4

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