• Question: What is the most spectacular thing that you have accomplished so far ?

    Asked by zmzmzm to Allan, Angela, Diva, Harriet, Nathan on 27 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by curiositycube, morgan8899.
    • Photo: Nathan Langford

      Nathan Langford answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Hi,

      One of the most exciting, weird and cool experiments I’ve been involved with so far was in my previous group at the University of Oxford. We did an experiment to show that we could create entanglement between vibrations in two large diamond crystals (about 3 mm x 3 mm square) in a normal lab environment (no ultra cold fridges or anything).

      Entanglement is perhaps the most “magical” feature in quantum physics. It says that two different, disconnected objects (which have perhaps never been in contact with each other before) can both be in two different physical states at the same time (in a “superposition”), but in a special way that they are always both in the same state… and this will be true no matter how you look at it and no matter what measurement you make on it. But the thing about entanglement is that it’s *very* fragile, so you can normally only see it if something is either very small or very cold.

      In our experiment, this was the first time that anyone had ever managed to show entanglement between two large objects (big enough to see with your eye and touch) and without any ultracold refrigerators (we did it at normal room temperature). This was a really exciting experiment and surprised a lot of scientists we’ve spoken with about it.

      Cheers,
      Nathan.

    • Photo: Harriet Groom

      Harriet Groom answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      On of the recent experiments I was most excited about was one that we designed to look at the building blocks of DNA deoxynucleoside triphosphates (dNTPs). I am interested in finding how many dNTPs are present in cells under different circumstances as part of a project looking at a protein that destroys dNTPs.

      To do this I broke up the cells, took out the dNTPs and used an assay to measure turning an 18 base-pair long bit of DNA into a 19 base-pair one using the the dNTP from the cells. The DNA is labelled with radioactivity so I can detect it by holding it against photographic film (the stuff you used to get before digital photos started being used).
      When I got my first picture, I was so excited!

    • Photo: Diva Amon

      Diva Amon answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Hey zmzmzm and curiousitycube,

      The most spectacular thing I have accomplished so far in my career is being part of the team that discovered the world’s deepest hydrothermal vents, which are like small underwater volcanoes! They were 5km deep!
      Here is a link to the video of what we found:

      All of the animals we found were completely new to science – never seen before by any human eyes! Being able to make history is definitely incredible! We also left some experiments of wood and whale bones to see what would come to feed on them.

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