Welcome back to the ‘day in the lab’ blog series! This week, I was well and truly taken out of my comfort zone as I wandered over to the physics department to spend the morning with Electronics Technicians Ashley and Lucy to find out what they get up to. As a human geographer, I’m much more at home with maps and people than I am with the bewildering world of physics and electronics. Indeed, circuits, resistors, and soldering are not exactly part of my vocabulary, and neither is dark matter, quantum mechanics, or the many other baffling things physicists seem to know all about! So, naturally, I was intrigued/slightly apprehensive to see what goes on behind the scenes to keep the physicists’ experiments up and running.

That’s where Ashley and Lucy come in. As technicians, one moment they might be repairing a piece of equipment, the next they could be designing and building custom circuit boards for a research project.

The academics will bring them plans for the circuits they need in their experiments, and Ashley and Lucy will work out how to make their ideas an electronics reality. Some plans arrive as detailed schematics, clearly laying out every component and connection. Others, Lucy laughs, are a little less fleshed out!

A detailed schematic of a circuit board needed for a physics research project

Holding up an example of a particularly detailed design, Lucy explains that these are relatively straightforward to build. However, when plans are less complete, the job becomes much more investigative and Ashley and Lucy must draw on their technical expertise to develop prototypes, test them, and troubleshoot any issues before producing a final circuit board.

It was fascinating to hear about the different routes Ashley and Lucy took into their careers. Both joined the university through apprenticeships, highlighting an alternative pathway into technical careers. Lucy explains that she knew from an early age that university wasn’t the right route for her and, for Ashely, he wasn’t particularly enjoying his A-Levels and wanted a more hand-on route into work. Alongside practical learning in the workshop, Lucy has also completed an electronics degree as part of her apprenticeship, recently achieving a first-class mark on her dissertation – well done Lucy!

Ashley in the electronics workshop!

Hearing their stories, I couldn't help but think how valuable these opportunities are. With so much emphasis now placed on the traditional university route, Ashley and Lucy’s experiences show how vital it is that apprenticeships continued to be championed and invested in as sometimes the best way to learn is just to get stuck in!

Ashley has now been in the role for 13 years but says he still doesn’t feel like he has completely mastered it as there’s always something new to figure out. I saw this variety first-hand as Ashley and Lucy took me around the department, showing me the wide range of equipment and projects they have worked on.

Our first stop on the tour was a chance encounter with PhD student Josh Fletcher. Josh’s research is in the wonderfully complicated world of quantum nanotechnology, focusing on semiconductors. Now, I’ll admit that this is where my human geography brain started to feel slightly out of its depth, although saying ‘quantum nanotechnology’ makes me feel very clever! In very (very!) simple terms, semiconductors are materials that can be controlled to either conduct electricity or resist its flow, making them incredibly useful for controlling electrical signals.

Josh was soon roped into a photo with Lucy and then explained how Lucy makes the bespoke attachments that he needs for his research. It was a great example of the often-unseen work by the technicians. The scientists might be asking the big questions, but Lucy and Ashley are designing, building, and fixing the equipment needed to actually investigate them.

Josh and Lucy in the lab!

Next stop was the MBE, or Molecular-Beam Epitaxy (yes, feeling clever again!). Looking more like something that has escaped a Doctor Who set than a piece of university equipment, the MBE is actually an incredibly sophisticated machine used to grow ultra-thin layers of crystals, one atomic layer at a time.

In very simple terms, it works a little like an extremely high-tech form of spray painting. Inside an ultra-high vacuum chamber, source materials are heated so that atoms form beams and travel across the vacuum before landing on a heated surface. The atoms build up layer by layer, allowing researchers to create highly precise, customised crystal structures.

The MBE!

This remarkable level of control makes MBE an important technology for developing advanced semiconductor materials and devices, including the tiny lasers used in technologies such as CD and DVD players. So, while it might look like a Dalek, there’s no plan for it to take over the universe (as far as I know anyway!).

With such complex processes taking place inside the MBE, it’s perhaps no surprise that things go wrong. And this particular MBE is a little unusual because it has been assembled from a mixture of second-hand parts. And so, getting it back up and running when something goes wrong is a big part of Ashley’s job. In fact, he describes the MBE as something of a “nightmare” that regularly requires his attention!

But it’s not just the MBE. A large part of Ashley’s day-to-day work involves receiving a report that something has stopped working and then figuring out how to repair it. First, he works out exactly what the equipment does. Then, he figures out whether it’s safe to work on - including, as he put it, the rather important question of “could this thing kill me!?” - and then getting to work fixing it. It’s a good reminder that being a technician involves great skill, but also curiosity and being a problem-solver (and ideally staying alive whilst you solve the problem!).

Ashely showing me all the very complicated-looking equipment he maintains!

We then headed into the lab to see ULTRARAM. Again, the science here is slightly (very!) beyond my area of expertise, but I’ll do my best to explain it without pretending I suddenly understand quantum physics.

ULTRARAM is a remarkable memory technology developed at Lancaster. It uses a quantum-mechanical process called resonant tunnelling (and no, I couldn’t explain that one either!) to create a new type of computer memory that could be faster and more energy-efficient than conventional technologies. The potential applications are huge, from data centres and mobile devices to the ever-growing world of AI hardware.

It was really brought home to me just how much research wouldn’t be possible without the technicians when Ashley pointed out that many of the components were built by his colleague John Statter, who has recently retired. John designed the invaluable schematics and developed the prototypes seen below.

A prototype circuit board for the ULTRARAM

Next, we headed into the really cool (quite literally!) part of the tour. We stepped into a lab surrounded by metal walls, where a team of researchers is working to investigate one of the biggest mysteries in the universe - dark matter.

And if you’re wondering what dark matter actually is, join the queue, because scientists don’t know either! We know it’s there because of the way it appears to interact with gravity, but unlike ordinary matter, it doesn’t emit, absorb, or reflect light, meaning we can’t see it directly. In fact, scientists estimate that dark matter makes up around 85% of the matter in the universe.

One of the experiments at Lancaster involves cooling superfluid helium-3 to very, very, very low temperatures. And when I say low, I mean really low. Doing this allows the researchers to investigate the behaviour of the helium in a way that could help them search for one of the candidates that dark matter could be. I’ll be honest, the finer details of this kind of went over my head…

What I did understand, however, was just how important it is to create the perfect conditions for the experiment. The lab needs to be incredibly well isolated, with no unwanted noise, vibrations, or other external interferences affecting the measurements.

And this is where Ashley’s skills come in. Part of his job is to design and build specialist filters and modifications to keep the outside world out. For example, the researchers discovered that lighting was generating a frequency which warmed the experiment. The Electronics workshop solution was to modify the electrical circuit that powered the lights, removing the noisy mains supply so that the room could be kept at the required conditions.

Throughout my morning with Ashley and Lucy, I was struck by just how much skill, creativity, and problem-solving goes into their work, with so much of it happening behind the scenes and without much recognition.

As someone who came into this day knowing very little about physics (and leaving still knowing very little about physics!), what I did come away with was a huge respect and appreciation for just how essential technicians are to the university. So much of the research we see simply wouldn’t be possible without their hard work.

So, the next time you walk past a lab and see a piece of complicated equipment whirring away, spare a thought for the technician who probably built it, fixed it, and is currently waiting for it to inevitably break again and I’ll see you next time for another ‘Day in the Lab!’

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