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Materials are a big part of our everyday life and a lot of challenges in technology are related to a generic “can we make this better? Can we use something else?”.
As a material chemist, it is my job to try to answer these questions either by creating new materials or find new behaviour in materials that we already know from other points of view.

In the field that I chose, the way we deal with this is by introducing “extreme conditions” in the mix. You might know what material you get and how it behaves in your “normal” conditions of temperature and pressure, but things tend to change quite a lot if you reduce or increase the temperature a lot, or you put strong magnets around your material, or you increase the pressure.
Pushing the pressure conditions towards the extreme is particularly interesting because we can make materials in that conditions and save them as they are, or we can study the way they change while we modify the conditions.

I particularly like to look at the way the atoms inside a material change their arrangement while you do all of this.
It’s usually the change in arrangement that makes the material behave different (maybe it was magnetic and now it’s not any more, maybe it conducts electricity better under pressure, you name it!), so if you want to actually find something new and then use it in a practical way, it’s a good way to go!

When you want to study a material the first thing you do is making the material!
In my group we have a lab that we can use to mix the starting elements and then heat them up to see if we can get something completely different afterwards.
We also have a huge machine that can not only increase the temperature but also increase the pressure to the point that you can recreate the conditions of 150+ km down the Earth! The material that you recover when you stop the machine is totally different from what you could get from just heating.

Once you have you material, you want to know how it looks like and how does it behave.
We use X-rays to see the way atoms are arranged inside the material, and we use other instruments to get the magnetic, electric and thermal properties of it.Sometimes if we need better results we can use bigger instruments that are available for scientists in places like the Harwell Laboratories in Oxfordshire, so we ask for some time there and travel down to perform the experiment.

All of these things leaves you with a pile of graphs, and numbers, and plots and picture.
The job is not done until you can’t make sense of them and give a complete picture to someone in terms of “I did this thing, in this way, I got this results and this means that the material is made like this, it behaves like this, it does it because of this reason and it’s really good and useful because of this other reason”.Getting the complete picture requires using the computer a lot, to use pre-made program or to write your own if no one else already did what you need to do for your stuff.

My usual day can sit me down on just one of these things or all of them together, it depends how it rolls!