Read all about it

My latest article has just been published! It’s called Emittance growth due to energy spread in a laser-driven proton beamline, and has been published in Results in Physics. It’s all about what happens to protons in an accelerator when they have a large energy spread, such as when accelerated by a powerful laser. I did lots of simulations and developed some mathematical relations between this energy spread and the growth in emittance of the proton beam, which we need to minimise in order to control the beam properly.

You can read the paper online for free!

My second research article

I’m very excited to announce that my second main research article from my post-doctoral research at Peking University has just been published in the Journal of Instrumentation!

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-0221/14/02/T02003/meta

This article is about simulating some of the complex interactions that go on between particles inside a high-intensity accelerator. Lots of simulations focus either on the accelerator physics of how the beam moves in the accelerator, or on the interactions between different particles in certain materials, but it’s hard to model both these parts together. The article describes the changes I made to a simulation code called Impact-T in order to try and understand what’s going on in these high-intensity beams.

Unfortunately, this journal is not open-access, so you’ll need a university subscription to read the full article. If you don’t have access and you want to know more, you can find some of the information in my latest conference paper.

I published a new article!

I’m very excited to announce that my first article with me as “first author” has been published in Physical Review Accelerators and Beams!

https://journals.aps.org/prab/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevAccelBeams.21.122401

The article is about magnets to be used to control high-intensity beams inside some linear particle accelerators. We want to make these magnets as small as possible while still being as strong as possible, and on top of that the strength needs to be adjustable for different beams. This is quite a challenge!

We tested out two different methods for solving this problem: firstly, using smaller, fixed magnets inside the accelerator and using larger, external magnets to compensate; and secondly, coming up with some interesting new designs for compact adjustable permanent magnets.

The article is open access, so anyone can read it!

Forging a Career in Academia

Forging a Career in Academia

Whirlwind

Ten days ago I was feeling happy and fat after Christmas, but I had no idea what I would be doing for the immediate future. Since then so much has happened it feels like I have been picked up in a whirlwind! It’s so amazing to look back on what has happened and see how God has been leading me through.

Continue reading “Whirlwind”

The Nature of Research

I had a very interesting discussion with my friend the other day, about what she should write for her MA dissertation. On thinking through what we talked about, I realised it highlighted the pressures of any research situation—the battle to balance three key criteria:

  1. What the researcher is interested in,
  2. What the key stakeholders are interested in,
  3. What is achievable with the available resources.

For my friend, the title of her dissertation at the start of her MA year was very much what she is interested in, it’s a question she really wants to find an answer for and is passionate about. It perfectly fulfils the first criteria.

Continue reading “The Nature of Research”

Cross-Cultural Conflict

I’ve learnt so much on this course, but nothing has been so surprising as learning that so much of what we take for granted is culture-specific.

We’re looking at causes of cross-cultural conflict within teams at the moment, and it’s been a real wake-up call for my future working in China. Systems that we take for the granted in the West are actually not very transferrable into other cultures.

Continue reading “Cross-Cultural Conflict”

sleepymatt

i’m really bad at this posting malarky. ah well!

had an amazing weekend, loads of old friends over, brought back many happy memories. i don’t like having to work!!

did my first london commute on tuesday. yukky. left home at 7.30am and got back at 6.30pm. normal by many people’s standards, but i couldn’t do it for life. i’m so lucky to live five minutes from work. day went quite well as well, and this week has good because there’s not too much going on, so i can catch up on the backlog and have a bit of time to muck about.

my stomach hurts, but i think it’s pyschosomatic because i didn’t want to go to football training… i’m so lazy…

my week…

had a nice trip to glasgow this week. seemed to go quite well, and fixed all problems before i leave, so we might have some happy clients! yay! decided glasgow isn’t the nicest part of scotland by quite a way, but the hotel i stayed in was quite pleasant, and the client payed for my food and drink so i had fun…

very nice to be home though: two nights feel like a very long time. still recovering from the 5am start on wednesday and the 6 and a half hour airport/aircraft experience getting home on friday. yukky.

played djembe at reroute this morning. reroute is the worship service for the youth in our church in woking. first time i’ve played a djembe on stage, but it seemed to go well. very good to see so many kids meeting with God.

tedium

so i’ve succumbed to sneaking entries into my fledgling journal at work… the problem is, you work really hard all day, then finish something big at 5.05pm. so, you look at your “to do” list and realise that starting anything else now is a complete waste of time, i mean, there’s only 25 minutes left until hometime and at least the last ten of those need to be used for glancing surreptitously at the clock and making your computer shut down really slowly, and the customers aren’t that nice anyway so why should i rush to get anything done?

so here i am with nothing much to do and a journal to pad out. it’s funny, i never really have anything to write or say, but it doesn’t really matter because nobody really reads it anyway, and it’s just a way of sorting out your brain. and my brain needs a lot of sorting out. not because it’s particularly large, it’s just a mess, like the inside of my pc.

on that note, let’s trigger a “friendly discussion” on macs and pcs. i’m at work, but i’m actually typing this on a remote desktop to my mac at home. why? mainly because i can, i guess. and it looks prettier, and i like checking up on my mac to see if it’s ok. i really want to get a mac at work, but there is absolutely no reason to, because i’d have to run windows on it and you can get a dell to do that at a hundreth of the price. poo. my reason is that it looks prettier and i could use it at home too, but my boss doesn’t really like that reason. i tried to convince him that it would be useful to have a mac in the office for testing software on different platforms, but seeing as we already know there’s absolutely no way our software would work on a mac, that didn’t wash either.

oops, got distracted—someone wanted me to do work! well, i’m now at home with my beautiful wife, so i’d better sign off.