The 'Office'

Since I've started at the synchrotron I've been really looking forward to the Open day.  The day we turn off the machine for the day and invite the public in to look about (after all they do pay for it!). I was pretty determined that Aus_Pod would be one of the highlights of the day so I set too looking for some ideas that would help us bring some of our science to life.   It's also given me a great excuse to introduce where I work these days!

Me outside the experimental hutch, sporting my new hair-do for the public

 When you boil down what the beamline does it come out that we're a very big, expensive and powerful wave machine.  In the optics hutch, locked away behind tonnes of lead, are a couple of crystals which filter the light coming from the synchrotron to one very precise wavelength.  The crystals are kept under a super vacuum which takes three days to pump down, which unfortunately meant that we couldn't open up the vessel for the public to see for themselves.

The crystals sitting inside the drum, when it was all opened up during shut down.  This is our 'filter' which lets us choose the wavelength of light we need to study each material.

With all this talk of waves, it's always good to have a wave machine for a hands-on demonstration.  A bit of searching I found great inspiration in this video.  Such a simple, and cheap idea that can show so much, it was constructed in the first half hour of the open day (we were at the end of the self-guided tour), pretty happy with the result!

Science and food - always a winning combination

Once we have a beam of light at the right wavelength, we pass this into an experimental hutch where we can place a sample into beam to study it.  The technique we use for this, diffraction, acts like a super-microscope letting us construct models of where the atoms and molecules are actually sitting in the sample.   This structural information has a great range of uses, from working out how a material conducts electricity to how a material gets bigger when we heat it. 

So that's my 'office', where I'm lucky enough to work.  There are the laboratories too where as my research cracks on a pace I'll be spending lots of time in preparing sample for the beamline. I've been lucky enough to be granted time for a couple of experiments in the run after Christmas, so that will be keeping my very busy. (To use the beamline, you have to write a proposal of an experiment and send it to a review committee - it's nerve racking but a great feeling when you get granted time).


As well as the 3000 visitors the synchrotron got, there was a live broadcast on the 3RRR radio station and you can download a podcast of the program - you may recognise one of the guests!