Showcasing student achievements

Fariha’s device, a fully configurable Tuned Mass Damper prototype

Fariha worked with the Technical Division during her placement. The main responsibility of the Technical Division is generating the X-rays used by the beamlines. They are also responsible for the buildings: the experimental hall and the office block plus any other laboratories, assembly and test buildings required. 

This Year in Industry placement allowed Fariha to gain a hands-on, practical understanding of vibration modelling, analysis and mitigation in a high precision scientific environment. 

Fariha gave a presentation on her tuned mass damper Year in Industry project at the 11th International Conference on Mechanical Engineering Design of Synchrotron Radiation Equipment and Instrumentation (MEDSI2020).

Fariha said: “It was a pleasure to represent Diamond and to be given the opportunity to share my project and to network with others in the field.”  

Fariha’s supervisor, Davide Crivelli, said: “Fariha has managed to develop a new device that will be installed in a beamline to improve their beam stability, not only for current operations but also for Diamond-II. She has been well integrated in the engineering department and it’s been a to pleasure to supervise her over this last year”.  

To take a look at Fariha’s submitted abstract for her talk on page 31.   

Paula undertook an industrial placement in surface science, focused on the structural characterization of molecules on surfaces.”

She had a first author paper accepted in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter and is titled “Determination of the preferred reaction pathway of acetophenone on Si(001) using photoelectron diffraction”. 

Sara's 12-month Year in Industry placement gave her the opportunity to work in the actively developing research area on solid-state transformations, from the metastable to the thermodynamically stable phases, of inorganic hydrates. Part of the project included performing synthesis and synchrotron powder diffraction measurements and Raman spectroscopy measurements at the ISIS neutron source to examine the unknown crystalline intermediate phases during the fast phase transformations.

During her placement she won the Young Crystallographer Prize at the spring meeting of the British Crystallographic Association for her poster “Kinetics of Phase Transformations in the NiSO4.nH2O system from 100 to 290 K”.   

Throughout Nina's placement she was based on the imaging platform at B24, which comprises a novel super resolution fluorescence structured illumination microscope (cryoSIM) and soft X-ray tomography end station (cryoSXT). 

Nina's placement title was "A comparative study of Candida species clearance by primary phagocytes using Correlative Light and X-ray Microscopy", which allowed her to study and characterise the clearance process of C glabrata using an established infection model of haemocytes derived from Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. 

During her time here, Nina co-authored a publication for the Journal of Visualised Experiments outlining the use of B24’s super-resolution cryogenic fluorescence microscope. Nina has also had posters accepted at international conferences. 

Elizabth Bolitho (right) in the I14 control cabin.

Dr Bolitho was the first joint PhD student on I14 to publish results. Her research investigated how osmium, a rare precious metal that could be used for cancer treatments, reacts in human cancers at a single-cell level.

Dr Bolitho, said: "Being a PhD student at Diamond was amazing, because I was able to collaborate with beamline scientists on a regular basis, and use state-of-the-art facilities to significantly advance the research, as well as contributing to such an exciting field.” 

Dr Bolitho has also published work with B24 beamline and recently won the 2020 Departmental Thesis prize at the University of Warwick.

"​Spin pumping in Antiferromagnetic Spintronic Devices" was the title of Łukasz's thesis while at Diamond, jointly with University of Oxford.

Łukasz published two first-author papers in Physical Review B and Phys. Status Solidi.  

In the first paper he used the technique of x-ray detected ferromagnetic resonance (XFMR) to study the dynamics of a Co/MgO/Permalloy magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ). The experimental results were quantitatively compared to the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert-Slonczewski model, where an in-depth statistical analysis based on a likelihood ratio test was employed to determine the presence of spin-current mediated coupling between the two magnetic layers.

In the second paper, Łukasz studied with XFMR the spin pumping through an α-Sn thin film. In thin films, with decreasing thickness, α-Sn transforms from a 3D topological Dirac semimetal to a 2D topological insulator. Getting access to and making use of its topological surface states is challenging and requires interfacing to a magnetically ordered material. Łukasz also presented these results at several international conferences. 

Kamal  was a student on B24 and worked on 3D imaging and sample preperation. He was the middle author on the Nature Protocols manuscript "Sample preparation strategies for efficient correlation of 3D imaging data at cryogenic temperatures: the journey towards multimodal bioimaging". He also has an online piece with Eurolab oline. 

Kamal, said: “My contribution to this work involved the use of gold nanoparticles on biological samples, which have an important role towards the end of the data analysis pipeline.  In addition, I introduced my PhD project in a short video for the EuroLab online magazine, where I discussed how we use correlative imaging to detect herpes simplex virus particles and cellular compartments using super-resolution cryo-structured illumination microscopy and cryo-soft-X-ray tomography.” 

Kamal also presented at Microscience Microscopy Congress 2021. 

A. Magnetisation distribution of an isolated magnetic skyrmion. The magnetic moments far from the centre point antiparallel to the central spin, with intermediate moments winding away from the centre in case of a Bloch-type skyrmion (and point radially in case of a Neel-type skyrmion). B. When a skyrmion is driven by an applied force F, it moves with a velocity v at an angle θSkH to the direction of the applied force. This angle is constrained to lie in the closed interval [−90∘,90∘], i.e., skyrmions cannot be driven backwards by a force that acts forwards.

Richard published a first-author paper in Nature Communications. In collaboration with the University of Oxford, a new technique was developed that allows for the measurement of the skyrmion Hall angle in the skyrmion lattice state. This has been successfully used to carry out the first measurement of the skyrmion Hall angle at beamline I10 in the room temperature skyrmion system FeGe.

Richard's DPhil thesis title was "Study of the structure and dynamics of magnetic skyrmions" and he now works in the Data Analysis group at Diamond.

Richard also presented his results at several conferences. Find out more about this research.  

Julien is a PhD student from INSA Lyon - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon - and Diamond. His project title was "Structural and functional characterization of PGRP-LB: modulation of the IMD immune pathway in pathogenic and mutualistic bacterial interactions".

Julien’s publication has been accepted in the International Journal of Molecular Science. In this paper he is presenting Drosophila PGRP-LB structures he solved on I24 and I04 and the associated reaction mechanism. This publication is part of his thesis manuscript, which he defended in July 2021.

Valentina's PhD title was "Unravelling the structure of glycosylated and deglycosylated immunoglobulin G antibodies", which was joint with University College London and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). 

Valentina’s publication, “Atomistic Scattering Modelling of Human IgG1 Reveals Conformational Changes on Glycan Removal”, made the cover of the May 2021 issue of the Biophysical Journal.  

Mateusz is a joint PhD student with the University of York and Diamond and his research focussed on the "Development of tools to automatically assess the quality and resolution of cryo-EM reconstructions". 

He was selected to give a presentation "The IceBreaker software for automated estimation and removal of the ice gradient on cryo-EM micrographs" at CCP-EM Annual Symposium. He has also recently had three papers published: 

• “CryoET structures of immature HIV Gag reveal six-helix bundle”   
• “Cryo-EM model validation recommendations based on outcomes of the 2019 EMDataResource challenge”  
• “Cryo-EM Map-Based Model Validation Using the False Discovery Rate Approach”  

Three dimensional visualisation of a micromagnetic simulation of three magnetic skyrmion tubes, showing their extended 3D structures and associated Bloch point singularities.

Max worked on I10, the Beamline for Advanced Dichroism Experiments (BLADE). During his studentship, Max performed ground-breaking research into looking at magnetic skyrmions. Magnetic skyrmions are swirls of magnetic spins that exist due to symmetry breaking in a crystal lattice which could be used in magnetic memory elements in the future. He did a lot of detailed work on the skyrmion hosting material Cu2OSeO3 to improve our knowledge of the effects of doping this material with Zn, to stabilise the skyrmion structure. He also performed the first real space imaging of the three-dimensional nature of the skyrmions, one of the first such studies to date. 

Related papers: 

• "Increased lifetime of metastable skyrmions by controlled doping"

• "Real-space imaging of confined magnetic skyrmion tubes"

• "Anisotropy-induced depinning in the Zn-substituted skyrmion host Cu2OSeO3"

• "Topological defect-mediated skyrmion annihilation in three dimensions"

Max won the Alan Martin Doctoral Prize for the Best Departmental Thesis at Durham University Physics Department.  

The "Development and application of 3D X-ray Diffraction for the study of phase transformation in metallic materials​" was the focus of James' research at Diamond and University of Birmingham.

James had an abstract accepted for oral presentation at The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) 2022 Conference for his work "Grain environment dependent deformation twinning in a TWIP steel: A 3DXRD study". His presentation will be in the symposium on “Advanced Characterization Techniques for Quantifying and Modeling Deformation”. 

Rachel is a PhD student on the I15-1 (XPDF) beamline, joint with the University of Birmingham.

Rachel presented a poster titled "​Exfoliated transition metal oxides for high-power grid storage batteries" at the BCA/BACG Spring Meeting 2021 as part of the Young Crystallographers' Group Meeting and won a prize for her work. 

Oli Blake (left) and Alfie Bumpass (right)

Alfie won an Apprentice of the Month award in 2021 for being an exceptional student in the Electrical Installation Unit.  

Oli received his award for always working to his best ability every week and consistently receiving positive comments from the trainers at Oxfordshire Advanced Skills.