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Asked by shahabdin00 to Charlotte, Colin, Becki, Rick on 26 Jun 2013.
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Rick Smith answered on 26 Jun 2013:
Hmm that’s a hard question. I’m lucky that I get to use loads of different and interesting equipment every day. But I guess my favourite one is a system that uses ultra fast laser pulses to take really really fast snap shots of what electrons trapped in tiny semiconductor nano-structures are doing on an incredibly fast time-scale.
Light is the fastest moving thing in the universe, it takes just 8 minutes for the light to travel almost 100 million miles from the sun to the earth. The laser I use makes laser pulses 83 picoseconds long (that’s 0.000,000,000,083 seconds) in that time, even though the light travels so fast, the pulses are only about 1 centimetre long.
It opens a window onto a world that is so small that things behave in really strange ways.
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Charlotte Dalton answered on 27 Jun 2013:
something called a rotary evaporator, this is a machine that reduces the pressure in a reaction flask to evaporate out the solvent (liquid) in there without heating it, so your chemicals don’t get destroyed! I use it like twice a day 🙂 plus it runs by itself so I can go get a coffee while it is on!
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Rebecca Scott answered on 27 Jun 2013:
My pXRF (portable X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer) because it looks like a phaser from Star Trek.
The machine itself is really cool and analyses materials without damaging them. The X-rays excite the electrons around an atom and as the electron gets excited it jumps out of the shell it is in. An electron from a different shell around the atom then drops down to fill the gap. As this happens energy is released which we call fluorescence. The machine measures the amount of fluorescence from all the elements in the material and counts how much of each element is present. We can then tell what the material really is.
Comments
jayp commented on :
@shahabdin00 my favourite is the Bunsen burner 😀