(gentle music)
- Hi I Kaye Morgan,
from the school of physics and astronomy.
I'm gonna give you a bit of a tour
around the science precinct here.
So we've got green chemical futures are right behind me.
We've got the library,
which is focused for engineering and science.
We've got the science faculty office.
We've got the student learning lounge,
which is just for science students to hang out,
work on assignments together and spend time together.
We've got the science student services just here.
So if you've got any questions about your enrollment,
which subjects you should be doing,
and then you can head in there
and then we've got the main physics building here.
So this is nice cause it's got
all of the student laboratories in there
and also the offices of most of the physics staff in there,
which means that you get to spend time with those people
who are doing exciting research
and who are also teaching you and you'll be passing them
in the hallways every day.
So let's head inside.
(gentle music)
So this is the entrance to the main part
where the first year classes take place.
Lets head in.
(upbeat music)
So this is the TAPAS area.
So we don't actually serve any
Spanish food here unfortunately,
TAPAS stands for The Area for Physics and Astronomy Study.
So this this space is always available to students
who are studying physics or astronomy.
So you can get together with your classmates
work together on assignments, brainstorm ideas,
lots of whiteboards to put your ideas up and try them out.
So this TAPAS area is actually surrounded
by all the first year teaching spaces.
So here at Monash,
we've redesigned the learning in first year,
instead of having students go into a lecture theater
and learn about physics,
we get them into some rooms
where they can actually do some physics
and figure out some of the principles themselves.
So we'll head in.
So this is one of the first year pastes studios
where their classes take place.
So when you're in this room, you do a mixture of activities.
So part of the time you might be doing experiment.
You can see some experiments set up here.
All the equipment is in the room, ready to grab.
You might be trying to figure out
a physics principle from that experiment.
You might be discussing with other people in your table,
how it works.
You might be doing some problem solving simulations.
So we often have laptops on these tables as well,
graphing the data as you go,
having some content delivery.
You can see we've got screens all around the room
so that you can, can do interactive polls.
You can put your results up
to show you the rest of the group.
So it's really a very dynamic environment
compared to the lecture theater, much more interactive.
And there's a lot of research,
not just feedback from students,
but pre reviewed research
that says this kind of learning environment,
give us much better outcomes in terms of your learning,
as well as your experience of university.
So really making sure that what you're getting
is way, way beyond anything that you could get online.
So you can see we've got some of
the open day experiments set up here.
So there's a whole lot of videos
you can see at the open day platform,
which we'll try some of these out.
So you can see the details.
Then we've got gravity defying wheel.
We've got the levitating superconductor over here
that Augustine we'll teach you about.
We've got the gravity well just here.
We've also got the impulse and momentum lab here
and the jumping rings over here.
There's also a nice fun one here with spinning stores,
which is very fun if you get to come in and do it in person.
And so Marcus will show you how these ones work with Amanda.
So definitely check out those videos online.
And one more over here we've got
is the magnets falling through tubes.
So I'd also recommend you checked that one out.
Alright, Hey.
So these these rooms here,
and we're gonna head to the next venue.
Hey so up here in this second, third year precinct
we actually start off with a lounge,
which is sitting between the second and third year labs.
So this is especially for physics and astronomy students
who can come here to spend time socially,
to work on assignments together,
to learn from each other
and make sure that you get a really nice
university experience beyond what you could get online.
So making friendships
and building connections with other students as well.
So lots of nice spaces here
and now we're gonna head into the third year labs
where you would be doing experiments.
(upbeat music)
So here in the third year lab,
there's a whole lot of really specialist experiments.
So students can choose the topic
that's most of interest to them
and do the labs that are focused on that topic.
We've got ones that you can come in here
to play with equipment in person,
and we've also got ones that you can do remotely.
So this one here the BD Ray spectrometer,
you can actually control it from home.
So you can be sitting on your couch,
driving the motors, watching with the camera
and get the whole experiment on there.
So with this equipment,
if you watch another video on the website for open day,
you can actually find a lot more information about
some of these specific labs
with the Head Of Department, Michael Morgan.
I'm just gonna give you a quick look through today here.
So some of the other equipment you can see here,
we can look at doing the MozBar effect right here,
which is actually running collecting data
for a student who's at home.
There's some equipment looking at at anti-matter down here.
So this is the positron emission tomography experiment here,
which is of course the basis for pet imaging.
We've also got some, nasty magnets over this side here.
So measuring nuclear magnetic resonance,
the basis of a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI,
as you would see there.
We've got some other huge magnets here
for the magnetic susceptibility.
Prac and one of the asset up that I think is really
unique and quite fun to use
is the scanning electron microscope.
So instead of using visible light to take images,
this one uses electrons,
which means you get really high resolution.
And the ability to just play around on one of these
is pretty cool in a third year lab.
And if you want the really kind of up to date modern one,
you just head down to the research center
for electromicroscopy down there.
So we'll head out.
(gentle music)
So just the other side out and let the labs
that we're looking at there, we have the second DA labs.
So we're just gonna look through here quickly.
These ones change every semester with different experiments.
So there's a few set up here.
In electromagnetism,
we've got four year synthesis of musical instruments.
So actually recording sounds from different instruments
and then breaking up that sound signal
into the different frequencies
that make up that particular type of wave.
And that kind of Fourier decomposition
is used in a whole lot of areas.
So even in the medical imaging work I do,
we use the Fourier transform to go from projections
to CT images,
to try and analyze what information we have in there
quantitatively, so some of these
things that you might not necessarily see
linking often do.
We've got some spectroscopy here.
So looking at the different energies of radiation
that we get out of gamma sources,
and also x-ray sources here as well.
- [Michael] Hello I'm Associate Professor Michael Brown
from the school of physics and astronomy.
And I would like to introduce you to our observatory,
which we use for third year honors
and masters astronomy units.
The observatory consists of an 11 inch telescope
and a 14 inch telescope,
both of which are computer controlled
and equipped with CCD cameras and tip tilt adaptive optics.
When our students sit in the observatory domes,
controlling the telescopes themselves
to obtain images of galaxies,
clusters of stars and stars with known exoplanets.
The students also process the images themselves
using the same methods as professional astronomers,
and then they analyze their observations.
Using their images
Monash students have determined that sizes, distances,
masses and ages of celestial objects.
We've also used these telescopes to obtain
spectroscopy of celestial objects
and students have measured quasars
billions of light years from earth
and measured the moving away from us
at tens of thousands of kilometers every second.
Observations from this observatory
can indeed measure the very expansion of our units.
(gentle music)
- So this is the new horizons research center.
So a huge building,
many research labs with people from Monash physics,
from Monash engineering, from the CSIRO.
And there's all kinds of interesting things in here.
We've got the coldest matter in the world,
the brozones and condensates in the physics labs,
which is kind of behind this big bunk apart here.
So they don't have any windows
because they need a really, really stable environment there
in terms of how temperature and space.
We've also got people working on next generation materials
as part of the fleet research collaboration.
We've got some x-ray imaging
happening right behind this wall here.
Perhaps lets head in and have a look.
So we've got a whole lot of research offices here
on the first floor for physics.
So if you do honors,
you actually will have an office based in here.
And then we have the research labs on this side here.
So the labs that are down this end of the building
are mainly part of a fleet,
which is the Australian Research Council.
Center of Excellence across multiple universities,
a center that's looking at
future low energy electronics technology.
So there's a number of research labs that they working here,
which we can explore.
- [Jake] Hi, my name is Jake Hellerstein.
I'm a Postdoc in Augustan Physics Group
in the school of physics and astronomy
doing research adjacent and theme
to the Fleet Center of Excellence.
I use scanning probe microscopy
to take pictures of molecules.
I'm interested in using molecular self-assembly
to create structures predicted to host exotic physics.
So here in this laboratory,
we have a special capability with this microscope.
It's called non contact atomic force microscopy.
So with these microscopes,
they're famous for taking pictures of single atoms,
but we can also achieve sub molecular resolution,
which in layman's terms is
taking a picture of a single molecule.
So that's what you see on the monitor here.
Here is a single molecule
where we're resolving the chemical bonds.
So you see here's these two molecules
and an active scientific question
that we're trying to answer is
what's happening between them?
Or specifically trying to determine
if there is a metal atom between those two molecules.
So in the larger context,
we have extraordinary control at the single molecule
and single atomic level.
And we can also measure the electronic properties.
So we can move these things around.
We can change the physical structure,
and then we can see what the result is
on the resulting electronic properties.
- [Yolanda] What we do in these labs is
growing to demonstrate on materials,
one single layer of atoms at a time.
We have microscopes that actually reach atomic resolution
and we can also study their electronic properties.
I'm Yolanda, and I'm a post doctoral researcher
at Fleet The Center Of Excellence
and I work at Monash university.
(gentle music)
- Hi, my name is Chris Thompson.
I'm a chief investigator in Fleet,
and I'm also a professor in the school of physics
and astronomy at Monash university.
So my field of research is basically atomic physics,
but I also do some work in biophysics.
And basically most of my research
involves applications of lasers.
I use lasers to cool atoms to very, very low temperatures,
just a few billions of a degree above absolute zero.
And I also use lasers to investigate properties
of biomolecules and biomembranes.
So in this lab the research involves cooling gases
to very, very low temperatures
or cooling gases to about
a field billions of a degree above absolute zero.
And this is a typical apparatus used to do such work,
which is called ultra low temperature physics.
We have a source of atoms down here.
This particular apparatus uses rubidium atoms.
We shine lasers in through the windows
and this allows us to basically
remove the energy of the atoms,
which may sound a little counterintuitive
because you usually think of lasers
as heating or burning things,
but there is a way to actually use lasers
to cool atoms down.
And then down in this part of the chamber,
we actually have a collection of atoms
that are at very, very low temperatures.
When you get to these low temperatures,
it behaves like a super fluid gas,
and we study their properties down there.
And this is another as the basis of superconductivity
where you can have electrical currents
flowing without resistance.
So the hope is by working with such systems,
we might better understand dissipationless
or low dissipation materials.
(gentle music)
- Hi, I'm Gary.
This is our ultra-fast laboratory.
Here we look at topological materials.
So we're trying to use ultra-fast laser pulses
to induce topological changes in various materials.
At present we've got a number of projects going
we're trying to induce topological changes
in graphings band structure,
using a circularly polarized light
and investigating those materials with terahertz pulses.
(gentle music)
I am particularly interested in the potential use
of top logical materials
in next generation low energy electronics.
(gentle music)
- [Shimonti] Hi, Shimonti
I'm a research post doc
in the school of physics and astronomy.
I work in a group of materials called todd materials,
which are only one or few atoms seen.
(gentle music)
They offer extraordinary properties,
such as high conductivity, mechanical strength,
extremely good optoelectronic properties.
I stack these materials like atomically thin levels
to create new hybrid materials
and experimentally study their electronic properties.
(gentle music)