Research

The goal of any experiment or simulation is to gain an understanding of some physical observable. However, the process of making a measurement is a noisy channel, i.e. there is information loss in the measurement process. This means that our experimental or simulation data will not contain all of the information that is present in the original observable. The goal of any data analysis is then to try and reconstruct the physical observable (to decode the signal, in information parlance), leading to a fuzzy, noisy estimate.

The measurement-analysis workflow showing the information loss in the noisy channel.

The SCAMs@bristol group is principally a method-development group. We are interested in improving the accuracy of chemical simulation analysis and using these simulations to understand neutron scattering measurements. Bringing neutron scattering and simulation together will present a robust tool to understand molecular and atomistic diffusion. Alongside the core of our work, we collaborate to use mathematics and data science to create better analysis approaches

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Thanks to Archie McLuckie for this fun ASCII-art!