Profile

I live in Bristol with my girlfriend who works at the Bristol Royal Infirmary hospital. I was born in Chester and lived there until I moved down south to complete my undergraduate degree in physics. I am currently in my final year of my PhD, and will be starting my first full-time job in January (at the ripe old age of 27)!

In my free time, I love playing and watching football. I also have a keen interest in fitness, and workout 3-4 times a week with a friend/ personal trainer!

I am a sucker for a massive burger (with cheese and bacon). Make sure not to tell my trainer that I eat them!

I work within the Nanoscience group at the University of Bath. Nano is a bit of a clue, it basically means really small, and by really small, I’m talking atoms! The materials I research are known as (long word incoming) transition metal dichalcogenides (or TMDs for short). These materials have super weird properties when they are thinned to a single atomic layer. How do we do this? It’s actually pretty simple, we use tape! The bonds that hold the multiple layers together are reaaaaaaaaaaally weak, whereas the bonds that hold each individual layer together are reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally strong. Think of the difference between pritt stick and super glue, and that gives a rough idea! I mainly probe these materials with laser beams. We use lasers as unlike a light bulb or the sun, they emit only one wavelength of light and so we can precisely control the way in which we interact with these TMDs! An example of what a flake of a TMD looks like is

My day starts with a quick scooter ride to Bristol Temple Meads where I grab a train to Bath and purchase my daily cappuccino. I get into my lab/office just before 10 where I quickly work through my (boring) emails before cracking on with a day of science! An example piece of equipment I use is shown below. This is called a scanning electron microscope. It allows us to take images at incredibly high magnifications as we use electrons (tiny particles that whizz around an atom) rather than light.

As I need to thin my materials down to single atomic layers, we use a technique called Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) to image our flakes. AFM allows us the measure the height of our flakes by dragging a very fine tip across the surface. The image below shows a flake that is about 5nm thick (0.0000000009m or nine one-billionths of a meter!).

I usually have a list of booked equipment so I can perform experiments. Every couple of weeks I will dedicate a day or two to analysing my data and forming some conclusions!