A PhD requires more publications, more data collected, and more time.>>
My son only published about 1 or 2 things all told, in his PhD work, not including the thesis itself. Maybe you're trying to describe post-doctoral stuff? I'm glad I didn't attempt to get anything beyond the basic BA in philosophy and it's probably talent that leads to greater things, rather than mastery of what has gone before. After all, in hard sciences, the emphasis is on building on what went before. In phisosophy, if I wished to make a name for myself it would involve replacing what went before.
You're not from the USA, so there could be some differences.
I'm not sure on the total expectations of a physics PhD, but I did know some PhD chemists there when I was in chemistry graduate school. It seemed fairly similar.
Although organic chemistry specifically took a massive amount of time in lab and took all of our free time while it did appear more quantum based chemists and physicists got to do a lot of work in more leisure areas.
For a PhD in any field, the general expectation is that you have become a producer of knowledge. This can occur at the master's level, but generally the focus is on mastery of the skills that are the foundation for the production of knowledge.
There are exceptions even at the PhD level. In some cases, the PhD will be granted to someone who shows only mastery of basic research and data analysis skills. This example of a cookie-cutter application of a theory to a problem it clearly will not fit is a case in point: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/arv_dissertations/523/
Nothing is going to change the fact that master and PhD students continue the same research of their advisor, where the main difference is the length of the program and the fact you need more results for a PhD.
Literally if I wanted a PhD, I would have used the exact same data from my Masters, but would just spend a couple more years doing it.
Tell us more about this MA work.
MS, not MA.
MS means thesis was also done.
Spent time optimizing synthetic organic chemistry reactions. Methods such as the reaction, work-up, purification, and using HMR to evaluate the compounds. It's protecting group chemistry. The term "optimization" in chemistry is synonymous with the laymen's terms for "inventing".
My advisor optimized a reaction under mild conditions in which he was able to transfer a certain chemical groups to alcohols, carboxylic acids, etc.
This transferred was optimized to show yield of 99% for the starting product, and then 90-99% for most products tested, showing that millions of compounds could have their group transferred.
Since the original protecting groups was successfully transferred in publishable yields (i.e you really need 85%+ for publications), my area of chemistry was to optimization other groups he wanted to transfer another structure that was similar.
Organic chemistry has many variables. This includes the time of reaction, catalyst of reaction, solvent of reaction, work-up techniques, purification methods, and analysis via HMNR, CMNR, IR spec, mass spec. etc.
As I said before, your research is generally based on the your advisor's research except your reaction goals are different and now you are taking it to the next step to optimize a reaction.