Profile

I’m from a small village just outside of Manchester – I moved to Scotland for university and I’ve found myself unable to leave!

I studied at the University of Glasgow and now live in Edinburgh with my partner while I study for my PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

Despite my love of nerdy things like the Witcher and Star Wars – I am quite outdoorsy and love exploring Scotland and have climbed a couple of munros (mountains) including Ben Nevis. I’m an avid football fan and follow my team Stockport County as much as I can – including a last minute trip from down to Nuneaton (near Birmingham) to see the team lift the title last season.

We are primarily spectroscopists – we study the interaction between matter (atoms/molecules) and light in order to generate a spectrum. Like below…

We interpret the spectra of gas molecules which are either confirmed or thought to exist in the interstellar medium – clouds of gas and dust between stars. The results we generate in the lab can then be compared to the light we see from distant stars. We then hope we can match up signatures and confirm whether the molecule exists in interstellar space.

In our lab we try to create conditions similar to interstellar space using high powered lasers, vacuum chambers and an ion trap cooled down to -269 °C!!

Below is a picture of our apparatus – which is housed in large vacuum chambers.

The equipment is an array of “quadrupoles” which, with the help of electric and radio frequency fields allow us to guide molecules from our source into the supercooled ion trap. We then use high power lasers to probe the trapped molecules before analysing them with our detector.

Once we have turned on all of our equipment – we’ll set about making sure it is all working as it should.

We check the high pressure gauges to make sure our vacuum chambers work and we make sure the laser is aligned properly towards our experiment.

All of our equipment takes a while to warm up/cool down – so during this time we will decide what wavelength of laser we plan to use. Once we decide, we will set up the correct laser and begin to scan our trapped molecules to collect the spectrum.

In between all of this I will probably be reading various papers from chemistry and astrophysical backgrounds and consider what other interesting molecules we might be able to observe.