Thomas Varnish loves his hobbies ' knitting, baking, pottery ' it's a long list. His latest interest is analog film photography. A picture with his mother and another with his boyfriend are just a few of Varnish's favorites. 'These moments of human connection are the ones I like,' he says. Varnish's love of capturing a fleeting moment on film translates to his research when he conducts laser interferometry on plasmas using off-the-shelf cameras. At the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, the third-year doctoral student studies various facets of astrophysically relevant fundamental plasma physics under the supervision of Professor Jack Hare. Growing up in Warwickshire, England, Varnish fell in love with lab experiments as a middle-schooler after joining the science club. He remembers graduating from the classic egg-drop experiment to tracking the trajectory of a catapult, and eventually building his own model electromagnetic launch system. It was a set of electromagnets and sensors spaced along a straight track that could accelerate magnets and shoot them out the end. Varnish demonstrated the system by using it to pop balloons. Later, in high school, being a part of the robotics club team got him building a team of robots to compete in RoboCup, an international robot soccer competition. Varnish also joined the astronomy club, which helped seed an interest in the adjacent field of astrophysics....
Jack Hare says running a science lab is rather like spelunking. In graduate school for plasma physics, at Imperial College London, he was part of the caving club. Each summer, he'd spend three weeks on an expedition to Slovenia, where they'd camp 600 meters underground for days at a time, mapping the subterranean labyrinths. In 2021, after three postdoctoral fellowships, he joined MIT as an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering. 'Caving was a great experience,' he says. 'I think the logistics side of those expeditions ' planning everything, making sure everything's in place, carrying everything into the cave ' has actually been really useful for building my lab.' Hare studies plasma, a high-energy gas in which atomic nuclei and electrons roam around separately. He notes that virtually all the matter in the universe ' stars, nebulae, the debris orbiting black holes ' is made of plasma. The team creates plasma in small quantities and watches what it does. 'We can generate these extreme states of matter that can tell us something about how plasma behaves in the wider universe,' he says. He calls it 'laboratory astrophysics.'...
