Question: What is your favourite piece of equipment and what does it do?

Lynne Thomas answered on 16 Jun 2014:

My favourite piece of equipment must be my diffractometer. What it does is it creates an X-ray beam and then shines this on a really small crystal. The crystal is 0.2mm in size and so I have to look at it under a microscope. The crystal causes the X-ray beam to be split up into lots of spots and the way it does this is related to the way that the atoms and molecules are arranged in the crystal. It has a detector which works a bit like a CCTV camera but for X-rays and then the computer does some maths to the spots and gives me a three-dimensional picture of the atoms and molecules in the crystal. It helps me to understand what the three-dimensional shape of the molecules is, and also how they are joined together into the crystal, mostly through things called hydrogen bonds. Going through this process helps me understand how my material works and this is all related to the atoms and molecules! It is an amazing to see molecules appear in front of my eyes even after I’ve looked at hundreds of them! And even more impressive is that I’m usually the first person in the world to have ever looked at what is in my crystals!