Research ROCKS !!!

I know this sounds pretty nerdy, but if you got to wear a lab suit, shoe covers, gloves, safety glasses and a hair net, you'd think it was pretty cool! I got to go into the cleanroom lab the other day and work with my professor.

(this is a clean room--you have to suit up before you enter and then you go through other doors. normally there's a high power fan that blows air on you to make sure you don't come into the lab with anything on you! the one i went into wasn't this fancy but it still looked cool!)

I'm doing research with a physics professor and so far it's awesome. It counts as a senior level physics class, I don't have any tests, and I get to do cool things and put it on my resume! How much better can it get?

We went into the fabrication lab and I got to use a PVD (physical vapor deposition) machine.

(this isn't the exact machine, but it looks kind of like this!)

We put some SiO2 wafers (what they use in semiconductors--don't know what that means) in the machine and then some high quality aluminum on a tungsten coil. We took out the air (made it like a vacuum) and then melted the aluminum. After it evaporated, we had to pump air back into the instrument (so we could open the door), and then removed the wafers. They were all shiny (looked like a mirror) since the aluminum evaporated onto them.

(an aluminum wafer--looked like this but didn't have the neat pattern on it!)

Pretty interesting stuff. Hopefully next week we'll go into the photolithography room and be able to put a picture on the wafer or some sort of design!