Demo Days

Hello,

It has been a far colder, more active this week so far, and my last here at Diamond. The weeks have flown by.


Monday was centred around a practice presentation. In the morning, I reviewed my presentation with my supervisor and was able to pick up a few tips to improve it further. By the afternoon, though, I had a mini audience as I gave the talk, this time incorporating a small demonstration along with. I thank all my audience members, who were the staff on the beamline for their attention and suggestions and support when my truck promptly fell apart. I now know not to strap the superconductors on in a hurry.

That afternoon, I also managed to figure out a way of storing the track, at least temporarily. Wrapping the set-up in foil and cardboard allows it to be kept flat and reduce the magnetic field considerably.

Tuesday morning was spent taking on board these suggestions and improving my poster. As mentioned, science posters are a good, visual way to impart information to many people, but they come with the restrictions of space and needing lots of images. Most my time was cutting down sentence size.

The afternoon was a long session with liquid nitrogen and the new superconductors which arrived over the weekend. This allowed me to set up plenty of trials and even attached more superconductors to the train, though in many cases it over-balanced them. However, I gained this footage, for those who've missed my demonstrations. The beeping is my oxygen monitor.

Wednesday started with me setting up the trains again, ready for the real presentation. The whole kit was carried to Diamond House's meeting room and I set it all out on the table. I did manage to catch most the talks, including ones about terahertz radiation to count electron clusters in the beam, steadying a imaging machine and topological insulators (find out more at diamondlifeblog.tumblr.com/post/92147428772)(apologies for bad explanations).

Unfortunately, I missed one talk, setting trains to cool. My presentation seemed to go down well, and I had 4 floating objects which I cycled through in order to let many people see. As mentioned in my speech, people seem to like physical demonstrations.

That afternoon, I was experimenting with bigger trains, along with 2 of the other placement students. They say a picture paints a thousand words so look!

Type soon!