Profile

I live in Manchester with my girlfriend, we enjoy going out for runs and walks in the Peak District and getting to the coast when we can.

I used to live over in Geneva when I was working out there. I still love to get out to the Alps for some snowboarding and hiking, hopefully that will be possible again soon!

I work for an experiment called CRIS at the ISOLDE facility at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.We use some of the smaller particle accelerators at CERN to fire protons onto uranium targets to make very short lived radioactive atoms which we can then study at our experiment.

The set of vacuum chambers where we overlap the lasers with the radioactive atoms

We do this by firing lasers at them, varying the wavelength until the light is absorbed. This wavelength then tells us about how the electrons arrange themselves around the heavy ball of matter at the centre of the atoms, the nucleus.

Some of our high-power lasers

Our main laser lab

This in turn tells us things about the nucleus itself, including it’s radius and it’s shape (sometimes they are shaped like a rugby ball or flattened like an orange or a frisbee). By studying this with lots of different atoms, we can compare the numbers to predictions we get from complex calculations to try and learn more basic things, like how the nucleus is held together.

When I was working at CERN, last year and the year before, day to day you might call me a laser jockey, often found in the laser lab manually adjusting mirrors to get the light to where we want it. Sometimes we might have some fun wiring something up, bolting some vacuum chambers together or writing some code to analyse the data you just took. Your really learn how to do a lot of different things very fast! True jack of all trades, master of none.

Life is a bit calmer these days, more often found in an office than in the lab. Coming towards the end of my PhD means spending more time writing about all the research I have done in my PhD thesis, the document based on which you are graded. Alongside this I’m often writing python codes to try out new things with data analysis, all to try and learn more from our experiment and work out how to do things better next time.