Question: what type of experiments do you do the most?

David Armstrong answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Most of my experiments are looking at the mechanical properties of tungsten alloys. What we are really interested in is how the properties change after they have been damaged by neutrons. Unfortunately this also make the samples radioactive which means I can’t have them in my lab. Instead we use tungsten ions (W+) which we fired at our samples at high energy and do a very similar sort of damage. I use a machine called a nanoindenter to measure the mechanical properties before and after this has been done. This allows use to measure mechanical properties in very thin layers which is important as the damage from the tungsten ions only occurs in the first 200nm of the sample. So far we have found that after implantation the samples get much harder tan they were before, but probably also less ductile.