Plants, Particles, and Palladium!

Plant diseases like Potato Blight cause major food shortages worldwide, driving scientists to develop new methods of protecting our crops. This talk explains how plants detect when they’re under attack, and how lab-designed sugar molecules can provide the upper hand in this ongoing battle.

Gold(III) complexes have gained attention for their potential as emitters in OLEDs. However, these complexes are synthesised through a mercury intermediate. My project focuses on the synthesis of the same using palladium intermediates.

The everyday world feels simple, but at atomic scales we enter the quantum realm, where a quantum coin can be both heads and tails and particles slip through walls. In this talk, I'll explore quantum entanglement—the resource that fuels quantum computers—and how its patterns may reveal clues about the universe's first moments after the Big Bang, linking the origins of our cosmos to the frontiers of quantum technology.

Quarks make up almost everything we see in the universe. The strong force joins quarks to make numerous types of particles; we’re interested in ‘strange’ particles. At our laboratory, we smash electrons into protons and sometimes produce new ‘strange’ particles. With top-notch detectors, superfast software and brilliant scientists, we can learn about the smallest pieces of matter in the universe.