Profile
Daniel Scully
Thanks for a really enjoyable event!
My CV
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Education:
A-Levels & GCSE (1998-2005), Unviersity of Warwick (2005-2009)
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Qualifications:
MPhys Physics
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Work History:
Potato Packer, Engineer, Farmer, Web Developer
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Current Job:
Particle Physics PhD student, at the University of Warwick, working on the T2K Experiment
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The job of Particle Physics is to study the basic building blocks of the Universe. Sometimes that means trying to understand how the particles we know about work, and sometimes it means trying to discover new ones.
I work with particles called “Neutrinos”. You’ve probably never noticed them, but more than 10 billion of them pass through your body every second! You don’t notice them, because they don’t do anything. In fact, alsmost all of them pass through the entire planet without doing anything.
The neutrinos going through your body come from the Sun, cosmic rays and nuclear reactors. But the ones I work with are made at a particle accelerator in Japan (J-PARC). It makes a beam of neutrinos and fires it right through the Earth to the other side of Japan. We have detectors at either end (ND280 and Super-Kamiokande) which tell us how the neutrinos have changed.
Neutrinos are one of the most common particles in the Unvierse, but they’re also the least understood. We study them because they should be able to answer some of the biggest questions in particle physics today: Why are some particles very heavy and others very light? Why is the Unvierse made only of matter and not anti-matter as well? -
My Typical Day:
We can’t all have a particle accelerator in our lab, so I spend most of my day at a computer…
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I work with scientists all over the world: in America, Canada, Cpain, Poland, Russia, Korea, Japan… so much of our communication is via e-mail. This way we can communicate cross-time zones and other people on the mailing lists can see what you’re working on.
But not e-mail isn’t very practical for many discussions, so we also hold regular phone meetings… of source with people scattered across the world there’s always someone who has to call in during the night!
Because there’s only one experiment, and it’s in Japan, my day-to-day work mostly ivolves writing computer programs. Some of these computer programs take the raw information that comes out of our detector, and try to figure out what particle were going through the detector, and how much energy they had. We call this “reconstruction” of the particles.
My other computer programs then look through this information to find a particularly rare combination of particles which no other similar experiment has yet found.
Less day-to-day, but still fairly often make visits, arrange visits to the physics department, give talks and put on demonstrations for school students, teachers, in fact anyone who wants to listen! -
What I'd do with the prize money:
I want every school student to know the particles that their world is made of…
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
High energy physicist
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Rarely, but I sat through a lot of class detentions.
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Jamiroquai
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
Usually I wish for a Ferrari, but if I had three wishes… I’d wish for three Ferraris.
Tell us a joke.
There are plenty of physics jokes, but none of them are funny.
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