It’s been a really busy quarter, beginning to get into more rigorous engineering classes along with my first upper division (Materials 101), but I’m VERY happy to say that I’m in the lab a lot more often this quarter than last, as a few new projects have arisen.
One project involves fixing up and redesigning the low-temperature Hall measurement system (a device we use to get information about charge carrier concentration and mobility in our samples). We are working on redesigning one part of the machine that will allow quicker responses to temperature changes as well as analyzing data related to a problem with not being able to match the displayed temperature with the actual temperature of the sample.
The second project is called the “spin-on glass project”, and involves a new way of processing samples for high-temperature Seebeck measurements (measuring the temperature-induced voltage characteristics of a thermoelectric sample). At high temperatures, the substrate on which the sample is grown begins to conduct and masks out any information about the actual sample that we need. Previous methods of removing the sample from the substrate have caused problems with inconsistency and fracturing the extremely fragile film, and a proposed idea is to essentially coat the sample’s surface with spin-on glass, bond the whole thing to a sapphire substrate (much less conductive), etch away the original substrate, and polish the sample to flatness. We will measure the flatness of the sample before and after this process using atomic force microscopy, a technique I’m REALLY excited to learn about.
Another cool development this quarter has been the addition of two new CEEM interns to the Palmstrom group. They are both seniors, Aamir (electrical engineering) and JP (physics) and it has been really fun working with and getting to know them so far. I am excited to see how much progress we will make together by the end of the school year!

Summer has been over for quite a while now and gone are the days when an undergrad could do research without having to worry about classes. Around the end of the summer, our chemical beam epitaxy chamber started to have some problems and every fix that the lab tried gave rise to more problems.

One thing I’ve learned is that it’s a pretty common occurrence to have malfunctions in a research lab that take a long time to fix. So in the meantime, what can one do to pass the time during which the mind used to be constantly stimulated?

Well, this quarter has been quite the journey to find out! Here’s a list of things I did to pass the time when I wasn’t doing research. I think they can serve as some good suggestions.

Go to a conference!

The 2013 SACNAS National Conference was an amazing experience filled with mind-boggling research presentations, fun, networking, and of course, FOOD! Dilpreet and Chris did a pretty awesome job of describing the conference, so I’ll spare you the repetition and sum up the experience in a picture of me as a decked out “Sacnista”

Get involved in your professional organization!

As you may or may not know, I’m in the process of switching majors from chemical to electrical engineering (yeah, getting into research can really change your perspective on things). Part of this switch involved getting into a new professional organization. Once an officer of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, I made the jump to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). I didn’t expect a professional organization to be “fun”, but IEEE definitely proved me wrong! I thought it would be a really serious organization, but it turns out it’s just a group of fun-loving nerds who like to build things. I couldn’t ask for anything better! In October I participated in IEEEXtreme, a 24-hour programming challenge where teams of three people sit in a room and solve various challenges. I was pretty delirious by the end of it, but it was completely worth the food, learning, fun, and new friends!

Check out the rest of CSEP!

So what do you do with that block of time you had set out for research but during which you didn’t end up going to the lab? I decided to kill two birds with one stone and was able to alleviate my financial burden along with my boredom by getting a job with the Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships (CSEP)! I didn’t realize until I started working for them how much they actually do. Because of the new job, I was able to stay informed about outreach events like Family Ultimate Science Exploration (FUSE) nights, which take place at middle schools where students like us get to run science demonstrations for junior high students and their families.

Here’s a picture of a little girl letting me play with a speaker she built out of a paper fry tray and some magnets!

It’s been a fun and busy (REALLY busy) quarter, but I’m dying to get back into the lab!

Here’s to a research-filled year! Happy holidays!

It’s 6:45pm and I’m sitting in the ThermoLab in the Engineering Science Building writing this blog post while doing Seebeck measurements.

I’ve been asked to reflect on my experiences as the scheduled end to my summer internship approaches. I honestly can’t seen an end to this project any time soon. There’s so much more to learn! At this point, I’m not thinking of things in terms of reflections, but rather in terms of “what’s next?”

Sure, in the past ten weeks I’ve learned way more than I could ever imagine (and I’m grateful for that), but rather than quenching my thirst for knowledge, the things I’ve learned have simply expanded my mind’s capacity and made me want more.

The simple things I’ve come to hate:
-Dirty soldering tips
-Messy work areas
-Bulleted lists (Oh, the irony)

The simple things I’ve come to love:
-The eerily soothing white noise from all the machinery in the labs
-The beauty of liquid indium (seriously, it’s awesome)
-Being a stone’s throw away from the Nano Cafe for 8 hours a day
-Playing music in the ThermoLab when nobody is around
-That euphoric feeling when data comes out as predicted
-Making someone say “whoa…that actually IS pretty cool”

I’ve come to realize that there are two sides to research: there’s the side that we love and that expands our knowledge, the side that we see in posters, papers and presentations. Then there’s the side that throws hurdles at you mid-jump…at face level.

We started having problems with our gallium source in mid-July, and it turns out it had to be replaced. Due to administrative complications (quotes, pricing, etc…who woulda known triethyl gallium isn’t available on Amazon Prime?), it still hasn’t been replaced. My project has taken some twists and turns and finally settled on observing the thermoelectric properties of rare earth doped InAsP (which there is barely any thermoelectric research on, go figure!).

I honestly can’t see this as a disappointment or a failure, though. I see it as a complication that allowed a new, interesting opportunity to arise. On top of being able to study something that might lead to completely new knowledge, I’m actually getting data!

I could go on with the generic “I’ve learned so much and I’m grateful to have had this opportunity” post, but that story’s the same for everyone (albeit very true), and this last Seebeck measurement is going to be done by the end of this song.

So I’ll log off with some acknowledgements
A thank you to Ryan Need for his guidance, patience, and being one of the most amazing mentors I could ever hope for.
A thank you to CSEP for funding this awesome endeavor.
A thank you to the entire Palmstrom group for being supportive and helpful throughout the summer.

However, this is only the beginning.

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.