Profile

I design superconducting electromagnets to steer the beam in particle accelerators. A superconducting material is one where, at low temperatures, the material shows no electrical resistance. This means that we can put high currents through thin wires, without them burning out like a fuse. This allows us to generate strong magnetic fields – of the order of 1000 times greater than a fridge magnet or strong enough to levitate a frog.

The projects I work on include designing new magnets and operating existing magnets. A magnet I am currently involved in designing is a superconducting undulator – to find out more about the role of undulator magnets, take a look at this website:

http://www.diamond.ac.uk/Public/For-School/Simulations/Undulator.html

My work is pretty varied from day-to-day and week-to-week.

Half my time is spent at my desk mostly doing calculations in Excel or working with some software to model the magnetic fields. I’m usually working with fairly complicated problems – so when I get started I don’t always know how I’m going to figure out an answer, I just sort of work my way towards it. This week I’ve been working on something that is new to me – so I got out a textbook, googled the words and concepts I didn’t understand, and have been gradually coming to an understanding of the problem. Hopefully at some point I will reach a point where I can work out how to calculate the number I want… it’s worked so far…

Other days are far more practical when we are operating magnets which are already in place. Those days are a bit more active – maybe using liquid nitrogen and a charcoal absorber to absorb any Nitrogen from a helium system, or setting up some vacuum pumps which have been repaired.