It’s hard work, but it’s nice to feel like you’re actually doing something

It’s a long way to Canberra from Alice Springs. But for David Johnston, the move to the capital city hasn’t been as different as he thought. “In some ways they’re surprisingly similar,” he explains. “Alice Springs is a lot smaller, but I still find that Canberra doesn’t have a big city feel, which I like. I also rate places on whether there’s good mountain-biking around and there’s good mountain-biking in Canberra.”

David is studying his Physics Honours at the Research School of Physics and Engineering, looking at atom optics.

“We’re exploiting the wave properties of atoms to run interference experiments. We drop some atoms and then using a laser we can split up that group of atoms and recombine it, which produces an interference pattern. The interference pattern can tell us how fast the atoms were going when they fell and that can tell us how strong gravity is, or how fast the laboratory is accelerating.”

“The specific thing I’m working on is detecting these atoms. We’ve got an atom interference experiment where the output is a couple of clouds of atoms. We need to know how many atoms are in each cloud. I’m working on building systems to measure that precisely. Essentially I’m shining a laser at the atoms. The atoms will scatter some of the light and will absorb some of the light and and I need to detect that.”

David says that he’s enjoying Honours as it gives him the opportunity to bite off a large project. 

“It’s hard work, but it’s nice to feel like you’re actually doing something. I’ve done a few research projects before, but in Honours you’re working on it full time, so you have more time to get your head around things.”

David is hoping to use the skills he’s learning to pursue a career in teaching.

“I’m in the process of applying for Teach for Australia. It’s a 6 week intensive teaching training and then you start teaching a class. I’m hoping I get into that and then I would be teaching for the next 2 years. I had a gap year before I came to Uni and I taught then and I really enjoyed it. So I’m looking forward to that next year.”