Hi! My name is Vishaal Varahamurthy, and I’m going into my second year as an electrical engineering major (switching from chemical engineering). My research project this summer involves attaching wires to tiny pins and making electro-spiders, shown below.

The majestic electro-spider in its natural habitat

Kidding, of course.

I’m working in the Palmstrøm Group with my mentor Ryan Need, researching indium gallium arsenide thermoelectric materials grown and doped by chemical beam epitaxy. Thermoelectrics are materials that generate an electric potential when a temperature difference is introduced across the material (they convert heat into electricity), chemical beam epitaxy is beaming a bunch of gases at a substrate to make layers of the material you’re trying to “grow”, and doping is simply adding beneficial impurities to a material. I measure the electrical properties of the materials that my mentor grows to gauge their thermoelectric performance.

They look pretty awesome, too:

Hall Sample (left); “raw” sample (right)

On the right is the sample before it is prepared for measurement, and on the left is one that has been prepped. The sample prep process is pretty crazy:

You have to apply indium dots onto the corners of a 5mm² sample and then attach gold wires that are about the width of a human hair to each of the dots.

Oh yeah, this is all done with a soldering iron and a pair of tweezers.

That ‘electro-spiders’ up there is actually part of a sample prep station that I’m helping redesign in the lab, which is something I didn’t expect to be doing as part of my internship.

I’ve actually been doing a lot of things I didn’t expect to be doing this summer.

Since I started research, I learned Solidworks in a matter of days to CAD a new sample prep station, leak-checked vacuum chambers which reach pressures as low as that of space, “baked” a molecular beam epitaxy chamber in aluminum foil (image below), and coded a data import system in MATLAB for one of our measurement apparatuses. I’m really grateful for the skills I’ve developed and lab members I’ve worked with while doing these odd-jobs.

I like to call it “Potato Beam Epitaxy”

In all seriousness, though, research is so much more than I expected it to be. It’s almost scary how one can learn so much in such little time. What’s even scarier is that the Internet no longer has simple answers for the things I don’t know (I guess that’s what mentors are for!)

I remember I was reading a paper and a few sentences into the second page, I stopped to look up a concept. One webpage led to another, and about two hours later I was about twelve Google Chrome tabs deep, learning about P-N junctions, Fermi levels, Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics, density of states. In fact, I completely forgot what concept I initially set out to look up. Figuring out a hard concept and connecting it to my project is one of the most exciting things about research. Although I’m sure that pretty much everyone around me already knows this information that is completely new to me, it’s really stimulating to be on the frontier of my own knowledge, never knowing what’s going to blow my mind next, be it some strange solid-state physics concept or a crazy new way to use razor blades to make a tedious task really, REALLY easy. I’m pretty sure that I’ll use the skills and knowledge I gain here for the rest of my life.

I know that I’m barely scratching the surface of materials science, but for now I’m taking this experience one day at a time, embracing every new bit of knowledge as another piece to the ever-growing puzzle of research.