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I work in the field of Carbon Nanotubes and quantum physics, these are nanoscale drinking straws made of Carbon, and like a straw, I can fill them up with metals and compounds. The picture below shows what they are, the bottom part of the pic is a sheet of graphene, if you fold it up, like a piece of paper you get a carbon nanotube.

This is pretty cool, as I can make the smallest nanowires possible.

What’s Nano?

Well a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, about the distance a Navy Frigate sinks if a sea gull lands on it.

So I can fill these nanotube with stuff and make nanowires, the smallest nanowires possible just 1-2 atoms in diamter (or about <1nm), which is awesome considering the record at the moment for nanowires in technological devices (your phones) is around 10 nm.

Why is this important?

Well, all phones and computers etc contain electronic devices, the smaller we can make these devices and electronics the more we can fit in the phone/computer, meaning they run faster and better.

What’s Happening?

Well now I’ve made these wires I found something interesting, the atoms on this scale bond slightly differently as they would if they weren’t inside the tube, making an allotrope. Something made of the same material, but a different structure (kind of like the coal and diamond).

I thought, cool, new materials, but with a new material, it’ll have new and different properties. So I have to understand these properties before we make them into devices.

How do I do this?

I use a tool called Raman spectrometry which uses laser light to excite electronic states which then scatter of low-energy excitations in a sytem emitting a slightly shifted light

(Sounds complicated, It’s not!)

Imagine this, you flick a wooden table with your finger and listen to the sounds, you get a sort of dense thunk sound.

Now do the same to a glass, you get a light ting.

By just listening to the vibrations of materials you can tell what they are and make a guess about their properties.

Raman spectroscopy essentially does the same thing, I flick (excite) a material with a laser and then listen to (look at ) the vibrations and then can make an informed guess about the properties of the material.

So that’s my work, just ask me if you want to know more.

(I’m omitting all the lazy things I do in this section to make me sound more productive)

I get in to work – check

I go into my laboratory and start the processing of turning on my laser system, a bench of green, red and blue laser light then gives the room a soft soothing glow. There’s lots of buttons to turn on, and some stuff I have to cool down, others I have to warm up.

I get some Liquid Nitrogen and start making things very cold (-200 ish degrees)

Whilst everything is cooling/warming, I go make a cuppa and start pondering what I want to discover this day, and how to do that.

I write some notes in my lab book to remind myself of what I’m doing and why and then head to the lab. I start some experiments, if this requires a lot of effort, I spend some time on thinking the best way to automate the process so I don’t have to do it (Work smart not hard).

I then set an experiment running, usually something like resonance Raman, where I tune the wavelength of light to match optical transition states of Van Hove Singularities that appear uniquely in 1D structures (I’m saying this now, as if you’ve read this far then you’re definitely interested in what I do)

Adter several hours of experiments and monitoring the data to ensure that the trends make sense and the data isn’t completely rubbish, I head back to the office to start using my computer (MatLab).

I import all the date I’ve acquired (which appear in text files) and start plotting them onto graphs, I look at the peaks of these graphs and fit the data collected to theoretical trends that I expect from my systems.

I think and write ideas down trying to turn graphs and numbers into scientific observations to understand what it all means. I also will read other scientific papers to try and see how my work fits in and whether it’s right. (It usually is)

That’s about it.

It’s interspersed with me doing outreach stuff and going to meetings and trying other ideas out and generally just having some fun when I can.