Profile

I’m a PhD student in Mathematical Science at the University of Southampton. I’m in the Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Group. Usually, I would be living in Southampton but have found myself stuck in Cardiff, Wales where I’m from originally (this is where the “get me out of here” comes in for me!). I’m fortunate enough to be able to work from here without much disruption, although not being able to talk to other people in my group as easily is a pain!

I co-organise a monthly seminar series for postgraduate students in the department called “Maths and Mingle” where we get to talk about what we’ve been working, have a chat over some puzzles and learn from professionals and academics who give talks about how to develop our skills and broaden our knowledge. I’m also the Vice-President of the Welsh Society, CymruSoc at the university and a fluent welsh-speaker – in fact, it’s technically my first language!

My PhD is titled “Dense Matter in the QCD phase diagram and Compact Stars”, which means I try and imagine what happens to stuff when its put under a lots and lots of pressure. An when I say “lots and lots” of pressure, I mean “squishing over a billion tons of matter onto a teaspoon” pressure. Now, we can’t reach that amount of pressure here on Earth, but there are stars out there which reach this level of squished stuff, and we call them Neutron Stars. Neutron Stars are so dense they’re made out of – you guessed it – neutrons (or at least mostly out of neutrons). Neutrons are one of the things that make up atoms (the small things everything is made out of), along with protons and electrons. However, when you squeeze atoms together enough, the neutrons, protons and electrons break apart and exist as they are. But why stop there? Why not squish MORE?! What happens when you squeeze neutrons, protons and electrons until they break apart? Turns out, electrons don’t break apart (which is nice, but isn’t very exciting), but neutrons and protons break into even smaller pieces called quarks, which are the smallest particles we’ve found so far. This level of squish might be how dense it is right in the middle of Neutron Stars.

So now you’ve got your squished pile of neutrons/protons or even smaller, weirder stuff, what happens now? Well one thing you can do is make it really really cold as well, like super-duper cold. What happens then? They turn SUPER – super-conducting and super-flowing.  Now they are superconductors and superfluids.  Imagine if you had a wire that never got hot when electricity runs through it or if you start stirring your cup of coffee/glass of water and it never stops swirling? This is the kind of stuff atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons start to do when you super-squish and super-cool them. Helium, the stuff you put in your balloons becomes a superfluid when you cool it to near absolute zero (the coldest you can go) and starts doing stuff like this.  Superconductors on the other hand are used in the Large Hadron Collider to create huge magnetic fields to contain the incredible particle collisions that happen there.  So we do have this stuff on Earth, but I’m more interested in the stuff we can’t find here, the stuff in Neutron Stars.

But since Neutron Stars are so far away (and dangerous) I will never get to go see the stuff, let alone do experiments and tests on it.  What I do instead is sit and think with my trusty pen(s) and paper (lots of it!) and maybe sometimes my computer when the maths gets too hard, and see what we can learn about the crazy stuff we might find in Neutron Stars and other super-squishy stuff. So, when people can finally go and put some Neutron Star on their teaspoons I can tell them what might happen…

I get up, go into university, sit down at my desk, turn on my computer, grab my pen and… start writing down equations. Then I cross out a lot of them because they’re wrong! I do this until I get to the result I’m looking for. Sometimes I use my computer for some help by coding programms that solve very hard maths problems – problems that would take too much paper and ink to find the answer. It’s like solving puzzles all day!

Not all science is exciting experiments and field trips, but this type of work suits some people (like me!) and helps tell the people who do the exciting experiments what to do and where to look next! And if a question is interesting to you, you might find your imagination is enough…

I share an office with other PhD students, some doing similar work, some people working on very different things. It is nice to talk to them sometimes, either about your work (which can sometimes help you when you’re stuck!), or about something completely different to make sure you don’t go completely crazy!