• Question: what is one of the weirdest things you have done in your job?

    Asked by maddy.s.36 to Stef, Dave, Ed, Guido, Hugh on 6 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by Benny.
    • Photo: Mariastefania De Vido

      Mariastefania De Vido answered on 6 Mar 2015:

      Hi Maddy! 🙂

      I think that one of the weirdest things I do in my job is to use lasers to shoot stuff!

      This rather odd activity goes under the fancy name of “laser-induced damage testing” and it consists in shining intense laser beams on samples made of different kind of materials until they blow up. Such tests are really useful to understand the effect of extremely powerful laser beams on materials and help improving material fabrication techniques and developing reliable high energy laser systems.

    • Photo: Hugh Harvey

      Hugh Harvey answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      There are loads of weird medical procedures that we do.

      I use our big scanners to help guide long needles inside people to get samples of their cancer – this is called a biopsy. The needles can be up to 30cm long (that’s as long as from your hand to your elbow) so I need to be very very accurate where I put the needle!

    • Photo: Dave Bond

      Dave Bond answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      I have to say I am sure everyone will some up with wierder stories as computing is hard to be very wierd. There is no glow in the dark gloop or lasers.
      The wierdest thing I will be doing this week is getting ready for an open day where we are wanting to explain computing at Diamond and the evolution of cluster computing. Cluster computing is where you have many computers working on the same task to speed it up. This involves bringing a two ton super computer into Diamond and we will be talking about it and how computing has evolved to what we are doing at Diamond. It is odd to think that in some ways the mobile phone in your pocket is a super computer, or at least in the 80’s it would have been, and it does not weigh two tons.

    • Photo: Ed Rial

      Ed Rial answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Hi Maddy

      The weirdest thing… this is such a hard question because things that might be weird to other people are just part of my everyday job!

      I think the strangest thing I’ve done at work was to repeat a high school experiment where you heat up a beaker of water with a Bunsen burner and use the temperature rise to find out how much energy you have put into the water. Except that instead of using a Bunsen burner I used a 250 million pound particle accelerator, and instead of a beaker of water I used a tank of liquid helium at -269 degrees Celsius!

      There’s also the day I spent at work helping over 200 people build a replica of the Diamond particle accelerators out of Lego. That was quite surreal!

      Hope that inspires you!

      Ed

    • Photo: Guido Bolognesi

      Guido Bolognesi answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Hi Maddy,

      one of the weirdest thing I have ever done in the lab was to deliberately hit the microscope with a metal stick (a small stick, not a big one :D).

      To cut a long story short, the issue I was dealing with was the effects of external vibrations on my in-house built microscope.
      In more details, when you look at very small objects, even small external vibrations (such as those produced by cars/buses running near the building of your lab) can be a problem. Indeed, if the sample vibrates, as you try to take a picture of it, the resulting image will be blurred (the same happens when you take a picture with your mobile of a moving object). A blurred image is difficult to analyse and so those vibrations have to be removed.

      Hitting the microscope was a way to inducing controlled vibrations on the microscope and on the sample. Hitting the microscope in different points resulted in different effects on the sample. In so doing, I realized my microscope was mostly affected by a specific kind of vibrations and I had to re-design it so to eliminate those negative effects.

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