User:Nucleosynth/sandbox

On 18 August 1941, she joined the Radiophysics Laboratory of the Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, an event that marks the beginning of the zenith of her career. During World War II, she was engaged in top secret work investigating radar. She was considered the Australian expert on the detection of aircraft using Plan Position Indicator (PPI) displays; post-war in 1948 she published a comprehensive report on factors affecting visibility on PPI displays. She also made important contributions to prototype radar systems operating in the 25cm microwave band, which greatly improved on previous radars.

After World War II, as the focus of the Radiophysics Lab switched from developing radar systems to repurposing those same radar systems for scientific pursuits, she was one of a few setting the direction for the rest of the lab. Her expertise as both a physicist and an electrical engineer distinguished her among her colleagues, most of whom lacked a formal physics education. In October 1945, Nature published a letter from her, Pawsey, and McCready documenting a connection between sunspots and increased radio emissions from the sun. In December 1945, she authored a comprehensive summary of "all knowledge available and measurements taken" at the Radiophysics Lab, and suggested future research directions that "set the thinking" for the group. In February 1946, Payne-Scott, McCready, and Pawsey performed the first radio interferometry for astronomical observations, their observations confirming that intense radio 'bursts' originated from the sunspots themselves. Their paper was also the first suggestion of Fourier synthesis in radioastronomy, an idea that hinted at the field's future of aperture synthesis.

From 1946 to 1951, she focused on these 'burst' radio emissions from sunspots. She is credited with discovering Type I and III bursts, and with gathering data that helped characterize types II and IV. As part of this work, together with Alec Little she designed and built a new 'swept-lobe' interferometer that could draw a map of solar radio emission strength and polarization once every second, and would automatically record to a movie camera whenever emissions reached a certain intensity.

After World War II, her work in CSIRO broke ground in the new field of solar radio astronomy, working at Dover Heights, Hornsby and especially Potts Hill in Sydney. She is the discoverer of Type I and Type III bursts and participated in the recognition of Type II and IV bursts. Payne-Scott played a major role in the first-ever radio astronomical interferometer observation from 26 January 1946, when the sea-cliff interferometer was used to determine the position and angular size of a solar burst. This observation occurred at either Dover Heights (ex Army shore defence radar) or at Beacon Hill, near Collaroy on Sydney's north shore (ex Royal Australian Air Force surveillance radar establishment – however this radar did not become active until early 1950).

Her scientific career ended abruptly in 1951 with her decision to resign to start a family, as there was no maternity leave at the time.