• Question: Your research sounds incredible! What can be gained from your research?

    Asked by to Becky, Clara, Daniel, Simon, Thomas on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Becky Martin

      Becky Martin answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      Thanks! I think it’s pretty cool, although there are so many exciting projects on here – the CERN stuff is fascinating.

      My research is focused upon radiation protection so I develop understanding of how radiation affects different population subgroups, such as women and children. I model how their nearness or proximity to a nuclear site at the time of accident can affect their radiation dose, so the amount of radiation that someone is exposed to – and I consider the long-term health implications of this, and the ways emergency planning could be adapted to reduce exposure times.

      My research is useful for public health and the emergency services!

    • Photo: Thomas Elias Cocolios

      Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      My research contributes to the fundamental understanding of what binds the atomic nucleus together. From my results, nuclear theorists can refine their models and better understand the overall picture, and analysts can gather more accurate knowledge. This, in return, is used in the design of nuclear power plants and for nuclear medicine (imaging, cancer treatment).

      The specific technique that I develop can also be applied to marine and aquifer studies by studying the naturally occurring radioactive tracers in water. They are so rare (1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000) that you need very sensitive techniques to study them. That study could have implication in understanding deep sea currents and general climate change.

      Finally, did you know that the World Wide Web had been invented at CERN to allow physicists to exchange data and ideas faster? And that cloud computing has been invented to cope with the data from the LHC? Those are ‘everyday’ things now. Or the lasers that are found everywhere.

      It is said that for every £1 invested in CERN, the British economy gets back £3 in contracts and developments. Isn’t that amazing too?!

    • Photo: Simon Albright

      Simon Albright answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      That’s because it IS incredible! Admittedly I’m a teensy bit biased, but I think it’s awesomely cool.

      The main goal of my research is to identify the most effective way of producing neutrons for cargo screening. We already know the technique works but no one knows what the best neutron source would be, hopefully I’ll be able to work it out! 🙂

    • Photo: Daniel Roach

      Daniel Roach answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      What I hope to be able to contribute is a set of techniques that make it easier for scientists to get definitive ‘these particular atoms are moving like this’ answers for materials that we can currently only say ‘on average, all the atoms move like this’. Sounds like a fine distinction, but it’s an important one.

    • Photo: Clara Nellist

      Clara Nellist answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Thanks! I also think our research is incredible, but like Simon said, we’re biased! 😉

      The main aim of my research with the ATLAS experiment at CERN is to study particles which are the fundamental building blocks of the universe! We want to understand what there universe is made of and how it all works.

      So, we recently discovered the Higgs boson, that we’d been searching for for 50 years (well, not me personally, I’m not even that old!).

      We’re also looking at why antimatter is missing from our universe (we think there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter created at the beginning of the universe, but we don’t know a lot of it has gone – see this answer for more details: /nuclearm14-zone/2014/03/18/whats-a-theory-of-what-happened-to-the-antimatter/)

      And then there’s dark matter too! We know that this is in our universe, but we don’t know what it is or how it’s works.

      But, just because we’re not aiming to create new technology from this research, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. Like Thomas said, the World Wide Web was invented at CERN to allow scientists to share their results more easily. Now we use it every day and it’s allowing us to have this discuss right now!

      There are also a lot of medical applications that can be done from the research at CERN. For example, if you shrink a particle accelerator, like the LHC, down to the size of a large room, you can put it into a hospital and use the hadrons (like protons) for cancer therapy. Protons are better to use than lighter particles, like x-rays, because we can focus their energy so that more of the cancer tumour is damaged and a lot less of the healthy tissue around the tumour. This is great for the patient, because they get cured faster and also have less of a risk of getting another cancer from the radiation (which is a slight risk, but with cancer therapy, the benefits of curing the current cancer, out weigh the risk of getting another one later). It’s also very good for curing cancers in the eyes, because you really don’t want to get much radiation in the brain if you can help it!

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