Meet the scientists!

The electron is one of the tiny building blocks that all matter is made from. The current theory of physics predicts that it will be almost perfectly round. But there’s a problem with the current theory of physics: according to it all of the stuff in the universe should have all been destroyed by antimatter millions of years ago! So there’s obviously something wrong with the current theory, because I’m pretty sure I haven’t been evaporated by antimatter. I’m pretty sure you haven’t either, otherwise you wouldn’t be there reading my profile!

One thing that could solve the mystery is if the electron wasn’t round, but was in fact egg-shaped. The reason is that if the electron is egg-shaped then matter and antimatter would have to behave differently. And this could be just the thing that stopped the disaster of everything being annihilated from happening.

So, what me and my team are doing is building a machine that measures the shape of electrons. So far we’ve made the most precise measurement anyone in the world has ever made. We’ve showed that the electron is so round, that if you blew it up to be the size of the solar system then any wobbles in it would be smaller than the width of a hair. That’s really, really round.

This means that we haven’t solved the mystery of the antimatter – but we’re keeping on trying, to make the machine better, so that we can look even closer. Maybe then we’ll see that the electron is just a little bit egg-shaped. And that might just help us figure out why it is that we’re even here.

One of the nice things about my job is that my days aren’t all the same. Some days I’m in the lab building new equipment. This often involves a lot of hands on work like: wiring up electronics, figuring out how to connect new pieces of equipment together, plumbing in the water supply for the equipment etc.

Another part of my job is analysing the data that the experiment produces. This mainly involves writing computer programs that scan through the data, working out the answers. This involves a lot of sitting at the computer, a lot of thinking, and a lot of reading of books to learn new techniques.

I also teach students by giving lectures, tutorials, and running lab sessions. This is a lot of fun, but it’s really tiring being a teacher!

Other things that I get to do are: go to meetings to decide what we’re going to do next; travel to conferences around the world to tell people about our results; and go and visit people at other universities to see what they are doing and see if I can learn anything from them.

Every day has some of these things in it, but every day is different. It’s great because it stops you getting bored!

I often get asked a lot of questions about my experiments and my work. Lots of people ask questions about the science of the experiment, but actually more people want to know what it’s like working as a scientist.

I’d like to make a short film about my experiment, showing a day in its life. The main aim of the film would not be to explain how the experiment works, but to show how all of the different people in the team work together to make progress. I’d like it so that after watching the film people have a better idea of what it’s like to work in a lab, with a team of scientists.