QET Labs welcomes the Future Brunels
“The Future Brunels programme
aims to inspire and enthuse young people with science and engineering
throughout their time at secondary school.
By introducing young people to the impacts science and engineering have
already on their own and other’s lives, and to the range of career options
available to them through studying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and
Maths) subjects, the programme encourages the Future Brunels to consider
careers in the broadest set of STEM fields.”
On Thursday 9th March, twelve Future Brunels students
aged 13 and 14 visited the QET Labs team to investigate the wave nature of
light, and how this can be used to measure minute distances such as the width
of a single animal hair.
The group began with a talk from PhD student Sam Morley-Short,
who described the long-standing 17th Century feud between scientists
trying to determine whether light is made of waves or particles. After learning
how the wave nature of light was finally determined by Young’s famous double slit
experiment, the Future Brunels were sent off in small groups to adapt the
original experiment to measure the widths of a number of different animal hairs
(generously donated by our furry friends at Bristol Zoo).
Carefully shining their lasers onto the hairs, the Future
Brunels were able to measure the interference patterns produced, which varied
in size depending on the hair’s width. By using their outcomes and solving the
double slit equation, the teams then collated their findings to calculate the
averages of each of their collected measurements to find a more accurate result.
Each group was also treated to a tour of our CDT lab by PhD
students Henry Semenenko and Jeremy Adcock, and finished the day off with a
question and answer session with the QET Labs team.
We look forward to welcoming the Future Brunels back to QET
Labs soon, and are excited to see what these budding scientists and engineers
bring to the world of quantum in the future.
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