Question: do you like doing what you do? what do diamonds look like in the middle?

Philip Dolan answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Yeah, I mean some days are boring, or frustrating. But all in all I’d say that I do enjoy what I’m doing. There’s quite a lot of variety, and it always requires me to use my head. Sometimes I just need to think how I’m going to arrange these mirrors and lenses to focus the laser, other days it’s about how can I use some expensive nano-positioners at ultra low temperatures to move my sample around. I like that I get to teach undergraduates too, as that is quite different and it’s a nice change from lab work!

The way that I look at diamonds is I focus a really bright green laser into the diamond and then scan this laser spot around. You can imagine it’s a lot like having a spot light in a dark room and scanning it around until you see what you want. What I’m looking for are very small (about 300nm) glowing red spots. I can collect this red light and try and use it for quantum mechanics experiments.