Profile

I live in north west London with two other physicists — currently our favourite thing to do in the evening is order a takeaway (pizza or Thai!) and watch re-runs of Futurama. I’m a member of the Imperial Choir and the theatre society, and I also organise social events for other PhD students in my group (again — lots of pizza involved).

I’m a he 😊

I’m currently trying to develop a source of very, very cold calcium fluoride molecules. Because they’re so cold (-270°C) we have to do this in a vacuum, otherwise all the water in the air would instantly freeze! Here’s a photo of my vacuum chamber (the lightbulb thing is a pressure gauge that tells us that our vacuum is as good as the vacuum at the edge of space):

and here’s a photo of what happens to the water in the air if we turn the machine on without making a vacuum first:

Once we have a source of molecules, we’re hoping to use one of these:

(called Zeeman-Sisyphus decelerator) to cool down the molecules even further, and then trap them. Once they’re trapped we’ll be able to control the direction and speed that they spin in, and hopefully use that to make a computer.