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I work on a subject called ‘photodissociation dynamics,’ which is a technical term for studying how molecules break up or react when you shine light on them. This is really important as chemical reactions caused by light (photochemical reactions)  are really, really common in the world around us. These photochemical reactions are what cause paint colours to fade over time and even some diseases, like skin cancer.

Although photochemical reactions are normally caused by sunlight in daily life, to study them in a lab we use lasers as our source of light. This is because it means we don’t have to rely on the weather to do experiments and laser light has many very special properties. (You can read more about this here) The lasers were use are a lot brighter than laser pens, so they can be very dangerous, as they can blind you and if you stick you hand in the laser beam, it burns your skin very badly.

We fire several different laser beams into a group of molecules one at a time. The first laser causes the molecule to react and the second laser acts a ‘spy’ to tell us how the molecule is moving during the reaction or what has happened to it.

These processes can be very complicated and to help us understand what happens, we use a lot of calculations that have to be run on very powerful computers. These calculations are based on the rules of quantum mechanics and can predict how the molecule is likely to react in our experiments.

We want to understand how photochemical reactions work in lot of detail so we can understand things such as how our DNA protects us from the harmful effects of sunlight and how chemicals will affect our atmosphere.

First thing in the morning, I switch on my laser systems as they take over an hour to warm up and work properly. While I’m waiting for my experiment to wake up, I see whether any of my calculations have finished or analyse any of the data from the previous days experiments. On a good day, I can then go into the lab and start doing experiments straight away but lasers are very temperamental and they break down very often, so a lot of the time I find myself having to try and repair things before I can get started. Some days, I also teach undergraduates or school students, helping them out with their experiments in the laboratory or will attend lectures given by other scientists on their research too.