January 6th, 2025 marks the first official day of the Watson Laser Lab!

We have boots on the ground at Curtin today. After a period of remote working and wrapping up some projects with the Mackenzie Group and the University of Oxford, Peter is moving into space in Building 204 of the Bentley Campus here at Curtin.

The Watson Laser Lab is proud to announce our successful bid for beamtime at the FELIX free-electron laser facility in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Starting a new lab can be tricky. How do we keep up our output when ironing out all the kinks from dormant equipment can take anywhere from 3 months to a year? This is where central facilities like FELIX come in, allowing the Group to utilise existing apparatus for our research purposes while we develop our own techniques in parallel.

The Watson Laser Lab is a glad to celectrate successful experimental at the FELIX free-electron laser facility in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Joining the group of Prof. Stuart Mackenzie from the University of Oxford where he had previously worked as a postdoc, Peter flew to the Netherlands two weeks of beamtime at the FELIX free-electron laser. Using the Free-Electron Laser for IntraCavity Experiments (FELICE) endstation, the team worked alongside the group of Joost Bakker and the FELIX operators to generate and study CO₂ activation on metal clusters.