• Question: What has been the most enjoyable experience you've had whilst doing you project?

    Asked by megsturner to Mark, Matthew, Mike, Paul, Sabina on 7 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by beep56.
    • Photo: Matthew Malek

      Matthew Malek answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Ah, it’s so hard to choose only one! I guess it was the time that I got to go SCUBA diving in my experiment, because that’s the most unusual experience that I’ve had. The experiment was a huge tank of water (see my work photos) and we were trying to understand the source of our noise. So I ended up going diving in the detector to make some measurements. Fun times!

    • Photo: Sabina Hatch

      Sabina Hatch answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      During my PhD I went to San Fransisco to present my work, that was a bit scary standing in front of all those people and hoping that they didn’t ask me questions I couldn’t answer. But I had a great time visiting the city and seeing all the sites!

      I started my current project 8 months ago. I guess my most enjoyable experience has been having such a supportive and relaxed environment to do my research. It is great to have a job where I am surrounded by lovely people and feel part of close group- it is like another family. I love coming to work everyday!

    • Photo: Mike Lee

      Mike Lee answered on 8 Mar 2014:

      When you work late, and everyone has gone home from the laboratory. You are there on your own, cracking on with a problem with some music turned up louder than would otherwise be appropriate. Good fun. Sometimes I dance a little bit between experiments.

    • Photo: Paul Coxon

      Paul Coxon answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      The most enjoyable thing is visiting and collaborating with different labs to do experiments. I use large facilities called synchrotrons which produce very bright beams of radiation from infrared to X-rays to study the materials I make. I’ve been to lots of these places, and they’re always great fun, if a little tiring.

    • Photo: Mark Jackson

      Mark Jackson answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      In 2004 I co-authored an article describing properties of cosmic superstrings, which are like superstrings but so large they are stretched across the whole Universe! Although they are very thin, we would know of their presence because their gravitational pull is so strong that light gets pulled around them. This acts as a ‘gravitational lens’ and you end up seeing two copies of whatever is behind the string! Nobody has ever found a cosmic string but if they did it would be coolest thing ever discovered.

      Soon after this, an astronomical research group had spotted something in the sky which matched this pattern: it was either two nearby galaxies which happened to be nearly identical, or else it was one galaxy which was being lensed by a cosmic string! The community was very excited and wanted to study the image in more detail, but the research group refused to release the coordinates of this object in the sky. This was very silly: everybody knew that they were the ones who had discovered it and gave them full credit, but we also wanted to know the answer quickly.

      I happened to mention this to an astronomer friend, and he casually remarked that he had figured out the coordinates. I laughed and didn’t believe him, until he showed me a recent catalog the other research group had published containing hundreds of objects, but only one was identified as a “double galaxy”. The other information about the object also matched the possible cosmic string event. It was amazing that such a simple method had been overlooked by everyone else. I asked him whether I could announce his clever discovery during a lecture I would be giving at Harvard University the following week, and he said it was fine.

      In my Harvard lecture I described the research I had performed on the cosmic strings, and then about how great it would be if this new object really were such an example, but alas nobody was able to examine the image in more detail because the coordinates were unknown – until now! I revealed the coordinates and explained how my friend had done it, causing the audience to laugh uncontrollably. One of the researchers attending operated a popular physics blog, and of course he immediately posted the coordinates there. So within minutes the coordinates went from being a big secret to known by everyone. I loved the small role that I played in this little drama.

      Postscript: the object turned out to just be two nearly-identical galaxies! So we still have not yet detected cosmic strings.

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