Christmas Lecture 2019
Our popular Christmas lecture is back for 2019! This time we have a fantastic line up of young researchers, who will be talking about their work at Royal Holloway. Join us and find out about the diverse, cutting edge research taking place in a festive spirit!
Rockin' Around the LHC
Callum Booth
What happens when you take two beams of particles, accelerate them in opposite directions and then smash them together at nearly the speed of light? Let’s find out! I invite you to join me on a tour of Large (Hadron) Colliders, Giant Particle Detectors and the Higgs Boson’s relationship with the heaviest known particle in our universe - the top quark.
Beam me up - What does a particle beam look like?
Siobhan Alden
Particle accelerators are an incredible tool used in a broad range of applications. If you are lucky they can even be used to unlock the secrets of a universe, but what does a particle beam look like? In this talk I will discuss how a particle beam is shaped and how they can be measured, in my case using lasers!
Building the next generation of neutrino detectors
Adam Tarrant
The discovery of the Higgs boson completed the standard model but there are still big unanswered questions. The development of new and novel detectors could help answer questions like: Where is all the antimatter gone? What is dark matter? Here at Royal Holloway we are developing high pressure time projection Chambers (HPTPC) to try and answer these questions.
A dark matter spin off: measuring lead contamination in drinking water
Adriana Dias
Lead pollution is the main cause of loss of life expectancy in the world. By bringing biology and particle physics together, the project aims to develop a low-cost device which will measure the concentration of lead in drinking water. The data is then acquired via a mobile phone app, ready to be shared to the cloud!
Superfluids: playing with spooky behaviours in the quantum world
Sebastian Spence
Superfluids are materials that flow with zero viscosity. At very low temperatures superfluid helium expresses increasingly exotic behaviours, many of which are still not fully understood. If we confine this exotic fluid within nano-fabricated glass chips, we can reach a small enough size and low enough temperature to clearly observe quantum effects. At this scale the idea of individual particles of helium is meaningless, while vibrations in the fluid no longer behave as waves and begin to appear as particles.
Virtual Reality and Immersive Audio
Florence Roberts
Virtual reality provides us with the wonderful opportunity to create experiences that, in the real world, could be inaccessible to many people. Although the current VR headsets were originally intended for gaming purposes, allowing the user to become immersed in fictional worlds, this technology has expanded into the research world, allowing for further exploration into virtual immersive experiences.
This is a free evening lecture from the Department of Physics at Royal Holloway, University of London and everyone is welcome.
Tickets can be found here.
Inspired by Wilson Bentley's snowflakes, designed by Emily Jane Foster
