Foundation Photonics - world-record breaking

This week at the University of Southampton's School of Physics and Astronomy we've produced a world record-breaking number of holograms - 110 in two days, and the students have designed and printed some excellent posters, based on photonics.

Benjamin Charlton, Adam Gibbard, Constantine Tsavliris and Ehab Otman researched Holographic Versatile Disks. Their poster is shown on the left. Benjamin said "HVDs can hold 4 Terabytes of information - which is equivalent to all of Google Earth on two disks - or the library of congress on 6 disks. Impressive!"

Ehab says "HVDs can record up to 1Gb per second - equivalent to a whole movie in one second!"

Work Experience Students Ginny Marshall and Tom Jefferson-Brain from local schools - Mountbatten Language and Sports College and Wyvern Technology College - have been helping run the show. Tom said about his experience,

"I have been thoroughly amazed at the things I have seen. I have learned about lasers and wierd phenomena around light theory - for example; interference, quantum effects and total internal reflection, whilst making holograms that turned out great. I've had the experience of being a student - and seen what it's like to be a member of staff at the front of the lecture theatre - something which many of my peers will not get the opportunity to do. I've had an enjoyable four days so far, not just making cups of tea - like many of my friends have had to do."

Ginny said, "so far my work experience here has been really good, I didn't even know that this branch of science existed before the beginning of this week. Seeing University life might help me make decisions about my future career - I still have no idea what I want to do. Adults have no right to complain about work, I don't want to go back to school!"



The Foundation Year students have seen the Light Express Roadshow. The Head of the course, Dr John Mills made a guest appearance during the show playing his guitar down the laser beam.

Mohammad Bilal, Stephen Elsmere, Trina Ng, Sam Berry and Chris Holmes - the Post graduate student helpers.

A Night with the Stars

Our work experience student Isobel Stone from King Edward VI School has written about our 'Night with the Stars'...

"On 1st April, the University of Southampton's School of Physics and Astronomy hosted an open night with a lecture by Prof Greg Parker on Astrophotography. About 45 people attended the event which started with a presentation by Mark Peacock on the World-wide Telescope. There were also some 3D astronomy pictures on display that the younger visitors enjoyed looking at.

Greg Parker then showed us some of the breath-taking pictures which he had taken from the New Forest Observatory (a dome in his back garden). He also showed us the equipment which he uses to take the pictures, some of which require an exposure time of up to 40 hours! One such picture was a beautiful shot of the horsehead and flame nebulae in the constellation of Orion - my personal favourite!"

After the talk there was a live link to Dr Vanessa McBride who is supervising undergraduate Astronomy students currently based at the La Laguna University in Tenerife doing astronomy research projects. Malcolm Coe hosted a Q & A session about the student projects whilst some of the visitors went on tours onto the roof - assisted by PG student Grace Thomson and myself.

The visitors were shown the moon and saturn through five different telescopes. Post graduate researcher Elme Breedt staffed one of the School's Meade telescopes in the dome, whilst under graduate astronomer Hayden Watkins showed people student research projects on extra solar planets, Sam Bradley from the University's Astrosoc - helped out as did 'Ian' from the Southampton Astronomy Society who manned two of his telescopes, one of which was home-made.

The craters and mountains on the moon were clearly visable and many people got the opportunity to see both Saturn's rings and its moon, Titan.

A small group of people did an Astrophotography workshop with post docs Tony Bird and Dave Clark and got some wonderful images of the moon, Saturn, the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades.

Aliens

Year 8 Students from Cantell Computing and Maths College took part in a STEMNet project at the School of Physics and Astronomy entitled- "Communicating with Aliens", with the help of Astronomer Sadie Jones (on the right).

Professor Malcolm Coe - also gave students a talk about how far away the nearest Aliens might be. The students researched types and methods of communication with the help of SETI.

Sadie awarded the students a prize of sending a message into Space. The students invited Aliens to earth to have a cup of tea.

Students attended a Q&A session with the Astronomer Patrick Moore as part of the project and took part in the University's Science and Engineering Family Day on the 7 March, which won an award for best Outreach Event.