1 hour of desktop use whilst writing 2nd year presentation

Around these months, every year the plasma physics group runs the “Student Seminars” on wednesday afternoons. All the PhD students give a 12min talk on their research, this year with three students per afternoon.

Enjoyable as it has been seeing what everyone else has been getting up to, I am facing a mixed bag of emotion whilst writing my own work up. Although  I normally love public speaking or presentations, there is something almost exam like about the process, also, It is hard to condense all the various tracks, and possible tracks the research has and might go down into a physics-y 12 min.

So in a small amount of procrastination I downloaded this program: http://iographica.com/ and produced something pretty

enjoy.

WEDNESDAY:

Today was a less exciting day (at least visually) as I was mostly desk bound doing some design work.

Old hardware for creating "end on" cylindrical wire arrays

Recently on MAGPIE  we have been upgrading various parts of the machine. One part was a bigger and better vacuum chamber. As a result allot of the hard wear from the old chamber has to be redesigned so it sits in the right place for everything “looking” at it.

Some quality white board action

One of the research fellows and I spent time in front of the whiteboard hashing out various problems with the design of the old hard wear and also brain storming ways around the for seeable problems with the load I want to investigate.

Getting some exercise..

The MAGPIE lab is located in the basement of the physics bulding, however our group offices are on the 7th floor. This leads to a foreseeable amount of lift abuse. I thought it would be a great idea to start taking the stairs, although it is taking some getting used to.

Later in the afternoon we had a seminar from a visitor from the University of Tronto who gave a really good talk on “Relativistic effects in absorption in ultra-intense laser plasma interactions”. Not exactly in the same area as the work we do on MAGPIE, but very interesting none the less.

So a little experiment here; A photo diary of what I get up to over this week in my PhD projects. I did mean to start this yesterday, but you know how it goes.

TUESDAY: In the Lab

Today I spent time on MAGPIE (see earlier post) working on our current shot series. Our experiments aim to create a small high velocity plasma jet which interacts with a puff of gas. We look at this interaction with a myriad of diagnostics including green light laser probing, optical fiber spectrometers, X-ray pinhole cameras, photo-detecting-diodes and streaked cameras. The little jet of plasma created on MAGPIE can be scaled up and compared to Jet’s created by young stars (shown below).

Hubble telescope image of plasma jet from a young star

MAGPIE creates a plasma jet from a bike spoke-like configuration of fine wires. Today I made the load, a very fiddly job as we were using 18 micrometer wires!

Putting 18um wires into MAGPIE

From the photograph you can see the fine operation of the morning. Wires are weighted with lead fishing weights. The big copper ring is the Anode, and the little circle is the cathode. The 1.5MA current pulse of MAGPIE will travel from the centre ring to the outer ring along these tiny wires to create our gas jet on axis. Super!

Action shot of me loading the wires into the vacuum chamber

Finished radial wire load!

The load sits in a large aluminum vacuum chamber, which once the load is made and all our diagnostics are ready to go, is closed up ready for the shot.

3rd yr. PhD student George with MAGPIE

The main focus of my PhD thesis (at least for now)  is plasma spectrometry. Most of my work o far has been focused in the soft X-ray region on the sorts of hot metal plasmas we create on MAGPIE. Recently however we have got a hold of an exciting optical fiber spectrometer which works in the visible wavelengths of light. I spent some time this afternoon learning how this works so I can start analyzing data from it this week.

2nd Yr. PhD student Guy shows me how to operate the visible light spectrometer

Alignment of our green light laser imaging system.

Around 4:30pm we fire the shot…

Timing, Vacuum, Valve and safety controllers for MAGPIE experiment. Oh, and also the fire button

Although not exhaustive that was my day. And its not over yet (as I write this on a tea break) !

More tomorrow…

The Bird

I am currently working on the MAGPIE experiment based in Blackett (the physics dept.). This so happens to be the largest university based experiment in the country. The experiment and the bird have little except an acronym in common (and maybe a love for shiny objects), MAGPIE stands for Mega Ampere Generator for Plasma Implosion Experiments.

MAGPIE comes under a form of “pulsed power” experiments called Z-pinches. The basic aim is to pass a very large electric current (in the case of MAGPIE, ~2 million Amps) through a small load (gas, micrometer thick wires or thin foils, not dissimilar to tin foil) in a small fraction of a second (in the case of MAGPIE  about a 240 nanoseconds). When this happens the load quickly becomes a plasma, and is compressed to very high densities by the strong magnetic fields created.

The sort of things MAGPIE is able to research include  Fusion, Astrophysics, and the fundamental equations governing matter. I am likely to write more on all these topics.

I really enjoy being based at an internationally renowned experiment which not only produces exceptional research into areas I am interested in, but also is such fun to work on. As this is a large experiment my academic work is not divorced from the day to day running of the machine. As such, I have picked up all sort of skills I wouldn’t have necessarily expected from a physics PhD.

This week I handed in the transfer report to my supervisor and I am now biting my nails in anticipation of the transfer viva.. which may be done by the end of next week.