Diamonds at the Glasgow Science Festival - by Lukasz Dziechciarczyk

On 16 - 17th June a group of students from the University of Strathclyde participated in Glasgow Science Festival. Every year kids and adults gather around stands, made by young researchers to learn about a variety of topics. The DST team gave them the opportunity to build a huge diamond model made of rubber balls and sticks (representing carbon atoms and bonds) between them. Kids loved the idea of building something from scratch and left us with a complete diamond model many times. To our awe (or shame) some of them managed to finish the model much faster than we could ever have been able to. For older folks, we had pictures of colorful diamonds with explanations for the yellow, blue or pink colour.

It was exciting to convey the cutting edge research in a casual fashion and bring our research field closer to the public. Our stand was shared with friends from Strathclyde Student Community for Optics, Physics and Engineering (SCOPE) at the University of Strathclyde who were kind enough to join forces with their show about the fundamentals of science about lasers and polarization of light as encountered on a daily basis. Our hard work paid off with many grateful and smiley faces!