A day at the National Physical Laboratory
This year, 5 SCOPE members visited the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, London. For over a century, NPL has been a synonym of excellence, contributing to the UK technological and economic development. More recently, NPL has started expanding to several locations in the UK, including Scotland. The latest is in close partnership with the University of Strathclyde, which prompted our interest and facilitated the logistics involved in our visit. We were welcomed to NPL by Richard Burguete, Postgraduate Institute (PGI) director, and met several NPL PGI students over tea and biscuits.
The visit was followed by a tour to the photonics and photometric laboratories and three short presentations on NPL’s work in quantum applications/detection. We then had the opportunity to network with the speakers over lunch, which NPL kindly provided. Following lunch, we visited the Medical Physics laboratory where Russell Thomas described the role of NPL in monitoring and improving dosimetry in UK radiotherapy. Related to this theme, we were then introduced to several nuclear physics laboratories across the NPL campus. We concluded our laboratory tour with a visit to the next-generation Kibble balance facilities, where we had the opportunity to see the current standard of the kilogram, and to discuss the role of NPL in the new definition of the standard unit (kg) as a function of physical constants. Our visit ended with a human resources recruiting and CV clinic event where the NPL HR department explained the NPL work culture and benefits, as well as information about some current available positions and career progression inside NPL.
Overall, I strongly believe that visiting NPL was an excellent learning and networking opportunity. This has also been mentioned by other SCOPE members and the NPL PGI director. Being a one day visit to Teddington, we had to take an early flight from Glasgow airport to Heathrow airport, which allowed us to minimise the costs by not staying overnight in London. EPS funds were used to cover taxi transportation, to and from airports, and dinner at Heathrow. The flights costs were covered through other physics societies, such as the Institute of Physics and the Optical Society.
To conclude, NPL goes beyond keeping measurement standards to actually re-define them, and the best of it is that they are more than happy to show you around!
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