In fact, he got us onto the front cover of the journal New Scientist that you you can see this is me with hair slightly less gray than now.

No periodic table time.

What was I thinking off?

We were using a material called Indium and Tim a night that's an alloy of indium in group three and antimony in group five, which makes the so called semiconductor.

We were using this to make a tunable infrared laser.

Or rather, we were using technology developed by a company.

We shone a fixed wavelength infrared laser onto this crystal, which was kept a very low temperature, four degrees absolute in a high magnetic field.

And as you tuned the magnetic field, you could get tunable infrared radiation, had a wonderful name spin, flip laser or invite spin flip Rahman laser.

It never worked enormously well, but what was important was that it got me and my PhD supervisor and collaborator Jim Turner really interested in infrared lasers and it got you on the cover of guilt is on the cover.

This has had a big effect in the work of our results group.

And now my colleague Mike George here in Nottingham has got wonderful infrared lasers and doing terrific experiments.

And it'll had its origin long ago with this magazine article.

And in fact, I got the sale we used to use here.

The cells made out of copper and it's cooled with liquid nitrogen that goes through one of the's pipes.

And now to the other, there's a little chamber inside with windows that too transparent to infrared light.