• Question: Can you tell me about your job, in detail please? :)

    Asked by chickenbrap101 to Arttu, Ceri, James_M, Monica, Philip on 22 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by ezadean, demio, flower123.
    • Photo: Arttu Rajantie

      Arttu Rajantie answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      I work as a Reader at a university, which means that I do research, teach students and also do some administration to keep the department running.

      My research topic is theoretical cosmology, so I try to understand what happened in the very early universe and how we could learn more about it using observations. I work mostly with my three PhD students or other cosmologists who are often from other universities. Large part of the work is writing papers and giving talks at conferences and other universities.

    • Photo: Ceri Brenner

      Ceri Brenner answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      I’m an experimental PhD student, which means that for last 3 years, i have been working in a group that consists of other students, post docs (those who have recently finished their phd) and my supervisor. We work together to plan experiments, carry them out and then analyse the data that we collect. Laser plasma experiments are only 6 weeks long at a time, so we have to make sure that everything is ready before hand and we know exactly how we want the experiment to work. 6 weeks sounds like a lot of time but in the heat of experiment it flies by and never seems like enough. I work on studying the particles that are accelerated in a laser plasma interaction, which means my experiments are based at laser labs all over the world, but mostly at the Central Laser Facility where I am based.
      When I’m not on an experiment, I am analysing the data (plotting graphs basically), writing papers and giving presentations of my work at conferences.
      I am now at the end of my PhD time which means that I am now looking at all the data that I have collected and trying to work out what it is telling me about the physics of the interaction. I am also writing my thesis, which is a formal write-up of all the experiments I have carried out and results from them. It’s quite a long document (150 pages or so), so is taking up most of my time at the moment.

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