Summer of Adventure

I sit here, back at my desk wondering how I got behind with my work. Then I realise, I've basically spent the whole of July away from the office. I'll break it down:

I attended the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.
This was an awesome experience, basically the idea is for a few select scientific research groups to showcase what they do at the Royal Society to the general public. It was fun and I must have spoke to 100's of people (all be it about the same thing) and it was sooo tiring! 1 week of staying in London engaging with so many different people at different levels takes its toll.

One other cool thing about this event was the chance to meet some well-known faces, such as Brian Cox and Martyn Poliakoff (left).
One memory that stands out particularly is the Wednesday evening party, standing by our stand presenting to officials...In tuxedos...in 32 degrees C. It was boiling! But we all managed!.








So what did we present exactly? Well our group focuses on trying to make the smallest nanowires to create devices. We do this using a technique known as Supercritical Fluid Electrodeposition, or SCFED.
What is SCFED i hear you shout? Well....
It's a technique of electrodeposition (the science of depositing stuff using electricity) and applying it to even smaller size scales. We get a template with holes ~2nm in diameter and begin electrodeposition, easy right? Wrong. Problem is the liquid we deposit from has a thing called surface tension, which prevents it from going down the holes. So why don't we use a gas? Well a gas would make it down the holes, but unfortunately gases aren't very good at holding things unlike a liquid. So we need a material, state of matter that's a bit of both. Hence a supercritical fluid. It has zero surface tension so can enter the holes, and has the solvent properties to hold the material we want to deposit.

Doing this we can deposit large arrays of wires in such an ordered, controlled fashion as to make transistors and electronic devices that are about 5x smaller than the current world record for such devices.
The outcome of this, hopefully, next generation electronic devices for memory storage, processors etc etc to make computers and phones even faster!

Next on the adventure list took me far away (sort of) to Vienna where I was to give a talk about Extreme Nanowires on my birthday! (What an amazing gift....)
This conference, ICAVS, aka the international conference on advanced vibrational spectroscopy, opened my eyes to a whole world of different applications of spectroscopy, from detecting explosives in luggage, to determining fake paintings and even mapping the homogeneity of cheap burger cheese.

The highlight was the final night where we had dinner in a frikkin palace! there was music by Mozart (not actually him) and dancing and great food and greeat company. Vienna was a lovely week, and a great place to spend my birthday, especially with my other half being there with me.













So that's nearly 3 weeks done now (i'm excluding another smaller conference I went on). Then I went on holiday for a week. And that's it! That explains right now why I feel like I've not done anything in a month, because I haven't!

Time to get back to writing a paper