I'm a final year MPhys student specialising in Experimental Physics at the University of Edinburgh. My interests include:
(PDF format) This is current as of 31/12/07.
It appears that I have been accepted to the CERN summer students programme from early July to late September this year. I will update this page as I find out more.
This is my own personal holy grail; I have dreamt of working at CERN for years now, but I always thought it to be far beyond my abilities.
During my stay at CERN I will be attending lectures by some of the most brilliant minds in Particle Physics, both theorists and experimentalists, as well as working to get the LHC online. This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and one that will benefit me academically and socially.
Pictures are now available here. Sorry for not adding more information, I will eventually!
The Large Hadron Collider is one of the largest collaborative physics experiments ever undertaken. Situated at CERN, the LHC is an enormous high-energy particle accellerator designed to perform a number of experiments to better our understanding of fundamental particle physics, including the continued search for the Higgs Boson, CP violation, and the way in which our universe was formed.
In the summer of 2006, I worked with the Edinburgh University Particle Physics (Experiments) Group testing and evaluating Hybrid Photon Detectors for the LHCb Experiment. These detectors are going to be part of a much larger pair of detectors, the RICH, which are an ingenious use of Cherenkov radiation to identify ("tag") charged particles as they pass through the LHCb.
The studentship I undertook was extremely enjoyable; I met many friendly, dedicated, enthusiastic and above all helpful Physicists, I learned a great deal about the collaborative environment in which these projects operate, and I greatly improved my current understanding of the collective knowledge of particle physics.
I strongly recommend any undergraduates considering a career in research to apply for Studentships during their free time over the holidays. Don't be shy! The majority of research groups are looking for future members, and it is a great way to confirm your choice of career.
The EPR Paradox is the result of a paper produced by eminent physicists Albert Einstein, Boris Podolski and Nathan Rosen. It was the basis of my Senior Honors Project under the supervision of the Nuclear Physics Group here at Edinburgh. The EPR paper posits that Quantum Mechanics is an incomplete or broken theory. This is the dream of many young scientists as QM is pretty difficult to comprehend, and has many unintuitive postulates which seemingly accurately predict the way our universe works. The aim of the project was to investigate this paradox by experiment, in an attempt to either verify or refute QM.
The project required the production of a report and a poster, which may be found here: