Question: Do you think your work can help humans?if so how?

Hywel Owen answered on 12 Jun 2012:

Yes, absolutely. Like many areas of science, research can be sort-of divided into two types: ‘applied research’ that leads to an answer that people can use straight away, and ‘pure research’ that has no application yet, but will probably have a use later on.

There is quite a lot of research that is done right now that has no obvious application, but history shows us that a lot of the time it becomes useful later. A good example is the laser. When the laser was invented it was just a scientific curiosity and there was no use for it at all. Fast forward to today, and every time you make a phone call you are using a few lasers to help send the signal on its way – the internet is only possible because lasers are used to transmit signals from one place to another (down optical fibres). There are lots of other examples like lasers, for example electricity, optical fibres, magnetoresistance (a physical phenomenon that is used in every hard disk in every computer in the world), graphene (the new wonder material), and so on.

I work designing particle accelerators. Most people think that particle accelerators are only used as ‘atom smashers’, for example the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. But out of the around 15,000 particle accelerators in the world, most of them (over 10,000) are small linear accelerators used for radiotherapy, in other words to make special X-rays that are used to treat cancer. In our research group we are looking at a new kind of particle accelerator called an FFAG (don’t worry about the name, it’s a bit long-winded) that accelerates protons for cancer treatment. We’re hoping that a new design we’re working on will be used for treating patients in about 6 years’ time, mainly for treating children.

Oddly, the same kind of accelerator can also be used to provide a very intense beam of protons to fire at a special design of nuclear reactor (called a subcritical reactor). Using an accelerator you can mix in lots of nuclear waste into the fuel in the reactor, and the accelerator helps to consume the nuclear waste by converting into non-radioactive forms. This is a very ambitious project though, and it will probably be 30-50 years before it is ready to be used around the world, although a test reactor is being built in Belgium right now. With enough of these reactors you can get rid of most of the nuclear waste we’ve made over the last 60 years of nuclear power.