This year Dr Fabien Paillusson and Dr Matt Booth are running an extra-curricular general relativity study group with undergraduate students. The group, named the ‘gravitation congregation’ are working through Thomas Moore’s book ‘A General Relativity Workbook’.

So far, the group have mostly reviewed special relativity but will soon be moving onto such topics as four-vectors, tensor equations, geodesics and the Schwarzschild metric.

Today the University of Lincoln hosted the Lincoln Get Hold of Technology & Science (LiGHTS) festival. Our school presented two exciting activities. Our own astrophysicists, Dr Phil Sutton, told to old and young about recent news from the world of planets and stars. The most young listeners asked the most difficult questions, like what is the shape of two very close stars.

Another activity was about the music of glasses, inspired by the work of famous natural philosopher Edward Delaval, FRS, once the owner of the Doddington hall next to Lincoln. This is a joint project between our experimental physicists Dr Matt Booth and Dr Martin Scheuregger, a lecturer in the School of Fine & Performing Arts at the University of Lincoln.

Phil Sutton (r)

Phil Sutton (r)

Martin Scheuregger

Matt Booth

Physics students in their second year at Lincoln gave fantastic feedback regarding the Industrial and Econophysics module. This module is intended to showcase some of the industrial applications of physics, with a focus on the finance sector towards the end of the module.

A series of guest lectures were given by local industrialists from a range of industries in which physics is a primary tool. Our local industrial partners include Micrometric Ltd, Teledyne e2v (UK) Ltd and the Radiotherapy Physics department at Lincoln County Hospital. In addition to the guest lectures, students were given the opportunity to visit the relevant industrial sites around the city of Lincoln.

Students visit Micrometric Ltd – a local SME with expertise in laser manufacturing.

Students were also given a case study assignment about Diamond Light Source synchrotron facility which they had visited the previous year. The students prepared a professional-quality poster on the subject matter from one of the guest lectures, and presented their work to their peers as well as to staff from the School of Mathematics and Physics.

On Thursday 19th January 2017 our first year students visited Diamond Light Source. Diamond, in Didcot, Oxfordshire, is the UK’s national synchrotron facility. Since it was completed in 2007 the facility has contributed to over 5,000 scientific publications in fields ranging from physics to archaeology and biology. In recent years the facility has been extended in its capacity from 22 to 32 beamlines in an attempt to meet the rapidly increasing demand for high energy X-ray spectroscopy and microscopy techniques in academia and industry.

After being given a lecture by David Price about the history of the facility as well as its current operation and applications, our students were given a tour. This was a great chance to get an up-close look at the various stages of the synchrotron generation process: the storage ring, the magnets used to focus and steer the electron beam, and the ‘wigglers’ that cause the accelerating electrons to emit synchrotron radiation.

This was a fantastic opportunity for our students to visit a national facility and to learn about the huge range of applications that such techniques, originally developed for physics, now have throughout science and industry.

http://www.diamond.ac.uk