From the Big Bang and anti-matter to tastier ice cream!

04 Jul 2016

Our revolutionary research at Royal Society Summer Exhibition

The University is revealing some of its most revolutionary research at the prestigious Royal Society Summer Exhibition this week.

The exhibition – which draws in thousands of visitors every year – is an exploration of advanced science and state of the art technology. The free event features talks, activities and more than 20 separate exhibits from the UK’s leading science facilities.

The University’s collaboration with Diamond Light Source, the UK’s synchrotron science facility, is showcasing their cutting-edge research using tomography – which allows scientists to build up a 3D picture of an object’s internal structure using a series of X-rays – and is used in many fields including radiology, archaeology and astrophysics. Diamond Light Source allows scientists to take a full 3D picture about once a second, creating a ‘movie’ depicting how the inside of materials change with time - this process is called 4D Science.

Professor Peter Lee, the Co-Director of MXIF (University of Manchester) which leads the Diamond Manchester collaboration, said: “We’re here to tell people up and down the country about some of the frontline work that’s currently taking place using this technique. The 4D Science exhibit will provide a first look at research that could help to provide next-generation consumer technology, early disaster warning systems and even tastier ice cream!”

An exhibit entitled ‘What happened at the Big Bang?’ will also be present, demonstrating the work that scientists from Jodrell Bank are doing to understand recent Galactic emission results from the Planck satellite. The exhibit will feature a model of the satellite, a 3D TV, an infrared camera and touchscreen displays, as well as various information and literature for visitors to take away with them.

Mike Peel, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, said: "We are looking forward to explaining the science of the early Universe to the many visitors to the Royal Society's Summer Exhibition over the next week. The Summer Exhibition is a great opportunity to showcase the fantastic observations that were taken by the Planck satellite, and to raise awareness of how these results improve our understanding of the Big Bang and the Universe as a whole."

The final Manchester exhibit, Antimatter Matters, will demonstrate the results of two experiments into antimatter in which the University is involved – including one at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Visitors to the Exhibition will be able to see how fundamental particles and antiparticles are identified, talk to researchers, try experimental techniques to hold and study anti-atoms, and to locate antimatter within a scanner system.

Professor Chris Parkes, who is one of the 50 people involved in the exhibit, said: “Antimatter might sound like science fiction, but it is one of the biggest mysteries in science today. We’re going to show everyone just why it matters so much – from what it can tell us about the earliest universe, to how we study it at the frontiers of research, to how it has everyday uses in medical imaging.“