Thread by @QuantumDaisy

Time for my #DayOfScience which I'll be doing as a throwback to a day at work last month!

My day starts at 8am when I leave the house to walk to the lab with a cuppa tea in hand ☕

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At 8:45 I arrived on campus and the Advanced Technology Institute which is here I'm based. The ATI is an amazing interdisciplinary workplace and has a great research culture which I love

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I did some admin at my desk in the open office until 9:30 when I headed down to the focused ion beam lab. Being a researcher involves more emailing than I anticipated when I applied for a PhD!

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I spent the morning working with the focused ion beam.
This allows me to do direct-write fabrication of nanostructures for rapid prototyping of new device designs. I spent the first hour or so mounting my sample and calibrating the SEM 🔬

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Once the SEM was all set up, I started the ion beam. To begin with, I was doing ion beam etching and I was looking at how I can prevent over-etching and the growth of unwanted structures which I'd encountered the week before

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Then at midday I took a lunch break which included a walk around the beautiful @UniOfSurrey campus ☀️

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Back to the ATI and down to the FIB lab at 1pm!

The plan for the afternoon was to do some cross-section etches and then analyse my data collected from an experiment with our superconducting magnet the week before 🧲

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From 1-2:30pm I did some more etching tests and then did some cross sections as well as capturing scanning electron microscope images to analyse at a later date 📸 This concluded my time doing materials engineering-type work for today!

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The rest of my afternoon was made up of reading scientific papers, drinking coffee, writing my own paper and some data analysis on data that I took the week before 📈

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A bit about my work: As well as developing techniques to rapidly prototype quantum devices, I do more physics-y research. I'm aiming to create devices that can control electron spin but to study this we often need some quite extreme conditions...

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The devices I work with are rather tiny (microscale) and are what we call quantum wells. That's basically different semiconductor materials sandwiched together so the electrons in them think they're in a 2D space

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To study the spin state of electrons in these quantum wells (and other quantum nanostructures I create), we usually put the device into a big superconducting magnet and cool it down to a few kelvin 🥶

(pictured is our superconducting magnet)

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At these temperatures, applying large magnetic fields (7T +) and measuring the electrical properties of these devices can tell us lots about what the electrons are doing inside, including their spin states and other properties

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Controlling electron spin is still an ongoing challenge as quantum systems are so fragile. The field of spintronics is all about finding ways to overcome this and create robust ways to utilise spin in different materials ⚛️

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Working in this field is challenging but so fascinating! And no two days are the same. The day I shared here was a fabrication-heavy day but many are spent doing physics experiments, or at the computer running simulations and analysing data

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Thanks for joining me for my #DayOfScience! Do check out @science_a_thon to see other people's days 👩‍🔬 Hopefully next year I'll be able to do a live day of science.

Here's how I like to unwind in the evening: cat snuggles and casual gaming 🐱

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Image descriptions for photos in this thread are in this instagram post: instagram.com/p/CVSVOKtMUX5/