Profile

I am a researcher in Physics at the University of Southampton. I love to skate, play video games and sew. At the moment, especially as the skate parks and ice rinks at closed, I’m really into Animal Crossing: New Horizons (who isn’t?)! When I’m not working, I can be found at the local makers club either 3D printing. Currently we are making personal protective equipment for the NHS and local care homes – we’ve made and delivered over 4,500 so far!

At sixth form, I studied English, Art, Physics and Maths at A-level. When choosing my A-level subjects, I was sure that I wanted to study some kind of English Literature based topic at University… Until I found I really liked Physics! More specifically, I liked being able to describe how things worked using equations.

After sixth form, I did a four year undergraduate course in Physics at the University of Bath. I really enjoyed my time studying Physics with lots of interesting new people! I decided to stay and keep learning.

When I’m not working, I enjoy rollerskating!

Recently, I left the University of Bath to go to the University of Southampton. I joined the Airguide Photonics group which works on hollow core fibres. My work involves investigating and splicing hollow core fibres.

When I’m not hiding in a dark lab, I also love rollerskating, gaming or sewing.

Three optical fibres that are transmitting red light. (Image: James Stone)

I design, modify and test optical fibres. These are thin, long strands of very pure glass, typically about the size of human hair, that guide light across extremely long distances.

I work within a team at the University of Southampton to investigate hollow core fibres and their applications. Usually, optical fibres are made of solid glass, but hollow core fibres are, well… hollow on the inside! This means their structure is almost inside out to a normal optical fibre!

There are very different types of day I can have, depending on what type of work I need to do:

• Testing optical fibre
• Modifying optical fibres

Testing the optical fibre involves investigating how it is working. We need it to carry light well, so it needs to lose very little! On these days, I will spend my morning setting up the necessary equipment to do this – it can take time to look for all of the tools that I need, as expensive equipment is often shared!

Once I have the equipment I need, I will launch laser light into the fibre. This can be very fiddly, because the laser light needs to fall on the end of the very thin fibre to get inside. I have to get the most light I can into my fibre in order to test it. I use a detector or a camera to see how well the fibre carries the light.

A powerful laser beam is sent through the optical fibre in a dark lab.

If I want to modify optical fibres, I will use a “splicer”. Cleaved ends of optical fibre are held, heated and then pushed together to form a “splice” where two parts of separated fibre are now joined together. This is really important to be able to launch into the fibre consistently and reliably, and needs to be done very carefully! Other things I might do on a splicer is to “taper” a fibre. This is when the fibre is heated and stretched. Lots of cool structures can be made with this method, that make optical fibres really powerful devices for all sorts of applications in telecommunications, biomedical fields and sensing.

Optical fibres are beautiful and very visually interesting to look at! We really love showing them off, but due to their small size the can be difficult. We have carefully created demonstrations, pre-recorded videos, image galleries, or very rigid models.

An example of some optical fibre equipment that I used with the general public.

While these are all exciting to look at and have a conversation around, my favourite activity that I have done with the public is making a mini spectroscope to take home. Spectroscopes are tools for inspecting the different colours that make up a beam of light, which look very beautiful and are also very scientifically informative. It is important for me that the audience gets to connect with, handle, and build their own science experiments. Spectroscopes are perfect for this, but there is no reason that optical fibres can’t be real hands-on experiments for general audiences too!

One of our scientists shows her audience how to use their freshly made spectroscopes (Image: William Wadsworth).

However, to make real imaging fibre experiments a public engagement activity, I would like to make some new experiments with 3D printed tools and raspberry pis. For example, using a 3D printed microscope, a raspberry pi camera, and some microscope lenses, we could show our real fibres in our public engagement activities. This would allow people to see, use and handle the real fibres themselves, rather than just images and demonstrations. How to build this equipment and experiment is then really easy to share, so anybody with access to a 3D printer could recreate this demonstration! Your school could easily have their own fibre optics experiment!

Onion cells through an imaging fibre. With some equipment, people could use the imaging fibre to do this themselves in our public engagement!