Chemistry, Math, Physics convo

TheDominance

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FCN Regular
Anyone here into these topics? looking for the hardcore nerds out there. If you have an interest or career in research that's always a plus. I am an electrochemist in research, but all are welcome, researchers, industry scientists, undergrads, or just if you have an interest in it. Hoping this thread can turn into a nice enjoyable place to have interesting scientific conversations, sharing of knowledge and where good questions can be asked, topics can be brought up and things can be discussed.
 
Ah good good, I was starting to lose hope after awhile. I'm a second year grad student in chemistry but I have a wide array of interests. I work a lot but I'm always around, this week I'm just working on getting an HPLC fixed and running
 
Great, is this a part of project for your grad thesis ? Do you have plan to continue working in Chemistry or plan to change subj? I'm a physicist, but open to all kind of interesting science discussions.
 
Not really, I need to isolate my product from a mixture that is quite tedious. Specific area of work is electrochemical synthesis. For now we are focusing on small molecules. Yea my goal is to work as a professor/researcher in academia.
 
Nice, electrochemistry has plenty of job opportunities... you can also tie up with industry to get funding for projects in addition to the specific topics within the academia.. All the best
 
Yea though I'm not even close to being done with the program. Got quite a ways to go but will hopefully be getting some grant writing opportunities soon. What kind of work do you do in your field?
 
Yes, probably it's a good idea to attend some lectures related to proposal writing. I am working in high energy physics, in particular flavour physics by analyzing the data from collider experiment.
 
Two of my graduate courses provided some practice opportunities under guidance of a professor. It's just a matter of doing a real one now. Also I always found particle physics interesting but one thing I have always wondered. How would someone go from undergrad in physics to working in that field. It seems to be a niche area.
 
Seems a good start.. good luck

During undergrad in physics, one can always go for short projects in particle physics, or else learn a bit of Quantum Mechanics in early masters and get attracted to it, or study further advanced QM and field theory and learn more about PP and go for it... later one can always choose one among three broad areas in PP - pure theory, phenomenology and an experimentalist..I can say more about these later if you are interested..
 
Hey I'm still around. Things got quite busy on my end for awhile even across the weekend.

Interesting, also feel free to talk more about it if you want. That's what I made this thread for, more than just surface level science talk. Personally I end up intrigued by pretty much all of science, I just tend to be a very curious person so I'm always up to hear more and possibly learn a thing or two along the way. One thing that might be somewhat related is the creation of heavier elements to try and find this supposed "island of stability" and if we'll ever figure out the other factors contributing to a stable nucleus besides just strong nuclear forces competing with electronic repulsions. Though such things would be probably decades away if it was to even be accomplished at all.
 
No worries, I was busy as well.. Hope you are doing well.

Nope, the fact is the strong nuclear forces are much much stronger than electromagnetic interactions (naively > 10^3 order), so what's going on within the nucleus is something special.. But when you are going to collide nucleus with extreme high energy electron or proton beams, you will reach the level of building blocks of such nucleons named Quarks.. Basically, Quarks & Leptons (called electrons, muons, neutrinos etc) together with photons and other force carrying particles are the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy of the Universe. There's one more - so called the God particle - Higgs bosons, that completes the set.. So my area is studying the matter-antimatter asymmetry within the elementary particle interactions which can shed light to the Universal matter-antimatter asymmetry..
 
We're slowly getting to the island of stability. The current challenges are obtaining enough material for the ion-beams and the actinide targets. While these isotopes are stable enough to use, like for example 248Cm, 250Cm and 254Es, it's still incredibly challenging to obtain a meaningful amount of them to actually do the experiment, even creating a few milligrams is currently very difficult. Once we get better at the synthesis of these isotopes, we shouldn't be too far from probing what's going on around N=184.
 
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