Meet the scientists!

I am a research student in particle physics at Sheffield university. Particle physics is amazing! It is the study of the tiny particles and forces that make up the Universe. We can capture high energy particles as they bombard us from space or make particle beams of our own.  Particle physics tries to explain how the Universe was created and what it is made of. I study particles called neutrinos. They have nearly no mass and can pass through anything, they pass right through our bodies all the time. This makes them really difficult to detect, as to detect them you need to be able to catch them and they don’t like to be caught! So we have to build the biggest detectors we can afford. We have built some in the sea or in the ice in the south pole. The experiment I work on is in Japan, at the bottom of a deep mine beneath some mountains, to shield the experiment from other types of particles.

I also work at a museum of science as their resident scientist. I think of ways to show how exciting science is. I get to do really fun things then explain the science behind them. Here is a picture of me doing a coke and mentos explosion and trying to walk on custard .  Can you work out the science behind these experiments?

 I’ll make a list of some of the things that I could be doing, here it goes:

travelling to a conference (possibly overseas!), making slides for a presentation, giving a talk about my work, doing experiments in the lab, having a meeting with my supervisor to see how i’m getting on, chatting with other academics and asking questions or trying to solve problems, marking students work (as a tutor), emailing, talking on the phone, making graphs, looking at data, reasearching on the internet, reading a scientific paper out of a journal, attending a seminar, asking questions, getting stuck, writing up my results, writing a computer program to simulate particles passing through a detector, growing mould, testing paint or plastics or glue for my detector I am builing, contructing a muon telescope, panicking that i’ll never finish my thesis, wondering what on earth my results are telling me, making a cup of tea.

Here are some things in a typical day that I do when working at the museum as a science communicator:

talking on the phone with scientists who want to communicate their work, watching science shows, visiting science festivals, training people on how to do some fun demos, explaining atoms to somebody, writing some text for a museum exhibit, writing a chemistry show, going to conferences, meeting people, reading science blogs and keeping up with twitter, persuading scientists to do something amazing for us, writing grant applications to ask for money, making a fun science video, talking to families about science, panicking that I’ve got so much to do and not enough time, making a cup of tea…

Cosmic rays are very high energy particles from outer space that hit our planet. We can detect these particles using devices called “scintillators” which emit light when a particle passes through them.  An idea I’ve had for ages is to make a cosmic ray detector jacket -  as you wear it you can see when you’ve been hit my a cosmic ray! I think it would blow the wearer’s mind to see how often they were being bombarded by these particles!

The principle of the jacket is as follows:

• scintillator shoulder pads – when a cosmic ray goes through the scintillator on your shoulder, the scintillator emits a flash of light. This light is transferred to a matchbox sized detector attached to your back. This detector converts the small light pulse into an electrical signal
• This signal is passed into a chip also on your back which fires LED strips that are placed all over the jacket. The LEDS light up when the cosmic ray has hit you!