• Question: What do you hope to achieve by the end of next year?

    Asked by anon-187690 to Stewart, Miriam, Marton, Laura, Kathryn, David on 8 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: David Ho

      David Ho answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      By the end of next year I hope to have finished the calculation that I’m working on at the moment and hopefully published the result. The current calculation we’ve been able to do with a pen and paper, but I know that the next one’s going to need a supercomputer to help solve. So hopefully I’ll have written a program that runs on a supercomputer, and used it to find a little bit more about how we might produce these sneaky theoretical particles that we’ve never seen….

    • Photo: Miriam Hogg

      Miriam Hogg answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      I am finishing up some work on white dwarfs (stars that have reached the end of their life and run out of fuel) and brown dwarfs (very large planets that would have been stars if they had been bigger, they are often though of as failed stars).

      My next project will be on white dwarfs and their planetary systems (which just means planets, asteroids, comets, and any small body that orbit the white dwarf). I’m hoping to look at what happens when a small planet or asteroid gets close to a white dwarf. I will be using a supercomputer and modelling a white dwarf with small objects getting close to it!

    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      To answer this let me say a bit about what’s happening at the Large Hadron Collider: it has been smashing particles together for 4 years now (it also did some smashing in the past) and is being shut down soon for 3 years. While it’s resting, bits of it will be upgraded, and the computer system I work on (which filters away boring collisions) will be completely rewritten. So the project I’m working on has 3 years to go!

      We break the work up into smaller chunks – I am hoping that my team and I will have reached one of our smaller goals by the end of next year.

      If you wanted to work in this area in the future, you will be able to: the Large Hadron Collider is planned to keep running for another 20 years!

    • Photo: Marton Olbei

      Marton Olbei answered on 9 Nov 2018:

      By end of next year I should be done with the majority of my planned PhD work, and start working on writing my thesis. But until then I want to finish my current projects, and hopefully publish them 🙂

    • Photo: Laura Kent

      Laura Kent answered on 9 Nov 2018:

      Thats a tough question! I would like to have introduced a new testing method for flexible electronics and start testing them in tough conditions like high temperature and high humidity! I would also like to start to develop a sweat test for wearable sensors. Sweat has lot of ions in and these can be harmful to electronic circuits. So if we were to have successful wearable sensors they will need to withstand this.

    • Photo: Kathryn Coldham

      Kathryn Coldham answered on 9 Nov 2018:

      Good question! By the end of next year, I hope to have conducted more studies for just one of the ways of how the top quark is made! I should have work finished on using something called a “Boosted Decision Tree”. This is a special tool used to separate a signal process (which is a process we want to look at) from a background process (a process that makes similar final particles as the process we want to look at, so it could trick us into thinking it’s the signal process!). I’ll also be going to CERN next summer, so I hope I’ll meet many more people there, learn lots and have written reports about my work!

Comments