Thanks to all members of the group who contributed their time and effort to design experiments and to help with preparation for the 2016 Cambridge Science Festival. Your hard work helped to make it our biggest and most exciting public event ever.
We presented an interactive talk in the 400-capacity University Sports Centre, exploring how an LED works, how combinations of different LEDs and phosphors allow high quality colour rendering, visible light communication, and the use of gallium nitride as a potential single photon source for quantum encryption.
We also put on a workshop for children between the ages of 4 and 7 years old, about electricity, conversion of muscle power or electrical power to light, and how incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs waste more energy than LEDs. Children also got to colour in their own convection-powered dragons to take home.
The Cambridge Science Festival is the largest free science festival in the UK, and the city of Cambridge receives around fifty thousand visitors over two weeks to attend talks, exhibitions and workshops for adults and children. To keep these events free, research groups rely on funding from research councils and industry, and many students pay for events from their own pockets. The Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride is grateful for funding for public engagement from the EPSRC through our Platform Grant, and to the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers.
