6 Months of the Watson Laser Lab at Curtin

It’s been 6 months since the first day on site at Curtin and the group has been busy!

As we come up on our first 6 month ‘group anniversary’ it’s a good time to reflect on what we’ve acheived so far. For the Watson Laser Lab the first 6 months have been characterised by a lot of back end work; getting to know processes at the University, meeting others in the School and around campus and getting a sense of what their research interests are for potential collaborations, working on infrastructure for the group like safe working practices and documentation, exploring funding opportunities and scoping out potential proposals, and a bit of advertising and letting people know we’re here and what we’re doing (like this post!).

That is not to say we haven’t been doing research! 2025 so far has seen the first cohort of students join the group, with potentially a few more joining in semester 2 and an RTP endorsed project being advertised now. In the last 6 months we’ve visited the Australian Synchrotron, HFML-FELIX, Elettra and Charles University as part of new and ongoing research projects and collaborations. We’ve worked locally in Perth with collaborators at ECU and are funding and building research equipment on campus at Curtin. We’re lucky to have had two publications accepted recently in J. Phys. Chem. A. One represents an IRPD study of (NO)_n and (NO₂)(NO)_n-1 clusters undertaken as part of Peter’s postdoc at the University of Oxford and the other a study of cobalt clusters (Co_n)with NO ligands from Peter’s first beamtime application to HFML-FELIX.

It’s been a busy 6 months and it looks like things are only going to continue that way. But it’s worth thanking all our collaborators, admin and technical support staff at Curtin, the Forrest Research Foundation and our students for all their support and hard work.