Revolutions made in Lund

Completely out of context: Our most recent lecture hall.
Once again it feels like Hogwarts ... Life is good!

As far as I know if you try to patent something and it was mentioned somewhere before the patent will most likely not be granted. I do not know if you can do any harm by unofficially publishing scientific results as well so I prefer to be careful. ;) Today our professor opened the lecture by showing us data which might be world record in electronics. The results are from yesterday so he was quite excited. Of course the results have to be further investigated but they look very promising so far! Professorquote: "World records are always fun!" I agree. ;)

The rest of the lecture was about toxic gases in WW I. No, wait. Not completely. But in one of the methods to fabricate semiconductor monolayers AsH_3 is used. This was indeed used as a toxic gas in WW I. Which is why they do not use this method in America due to administrative approval problems. Instead they prefer a method which is a few million (probably ;) ) dollars more expensive. I expected that in a country where children chocolate eggs are forbidden in favour of machine guns a toxic gas in science would be something to cheerfully approve ... Summarising comment of a class mate: "Crazy people ..."

Still after the toxic gases the professor drew some "funky quantum wells" (his expression ...) on the board. By combinig different materials it is possible to form the weirdest band structures. As he said: "I do not know what this might be good for but it is possible." Well ok then, it is always better to ask "Why not?" than "Why?" in research. Although while still studying it is more the latter that you ask ... Quite desperately sometimes. ;)

Nanowires

Now that my new semester started I thought I'd share a short excerpt about what "we" do here in Lund - what is special for Lund research. It is everywhere here. If you study here you might even forget that there is something else going on (in physics). It is nanowires. In principle they are exactly what the name implies. Wires. Small. But first of course the always most important question first: Why would you investigate them?

They show some very interesting properties that conventional wires do not show. These properties lead to promising application possibilities such as (of course) wires in ever modern devices which are getting smaller and smaller. But here besides being small they already show further promising advantages. By combining materials in a way described further below they might allow transmission of two signals in opposing directions at the same time or introduce barriers or quantum wells to quantise conductance. Furthermore, junctions of nanowires might allow to study Majorana fermions which is an interesting scientific field. (Should I roughly understand what Majorana fermions are I might write an article about them but so far I only understand that they seem to very interesting ...) There are some possibilities for medical sciences as well but I do not know much about this. (E.g. something with detecting cancer I think.) Not to forget applications in power generation as I described in the article "The future of solar cells?".

Figure 1: Examples of nanowire
structures consisting of different
materials. The right image is a
cross-section through a wire.
A structure of this kind allows to
transport two signals at the same
time.

Now how are they fabricated and why do they have further interesting properties than just being small? And what actually is small? Nanowires again already implies the size: The diameter of nanowires usually ranges from a few to a few ten nanometers. Their length is usually at least 20 times as long. Otherwise it would not be a wire ... The small diameter now gives the wires a large surface to volume ratio. And this is the interesting part!

If you grow different elements on top of each other in crystalline structures often the top layer will break after a few nanometers. This is because different elements have different distances between the atoms in the crystals which causes strain in the growing layer. After a few nanometers this strain will be too large to allow a monocrystalline structure and the crystal breaks. You cannot use it for devices anymore. With the large surface to volume ratio the nanowires can balance the strain as there is a lot of space for the atoms to gradually change from one crystal structure to another and the different crystals do not break. This can be used to grow heterostructures in ways shown in figure 1.

The principle of fabricating nanowires is as easy as elegant. (Note: the principle.) On a substrate seed particles are distributed by nanoimprint (basically using a nanostamp) or from a gas. Afterwards the nanowire material is applied as gas as well. It will settle on the seed particles, diffuse through them and push the seed up. So underneath the seed there grow the wires. Afterwards branches can be grown and stuff like that. Which is basically what happens in Lund all day. ;)

Figures 2a) (top) Seed particles on a substrate. 2b) (bottom) Different stages of growing nanowires.

Hacking under the christmas tree

Just in time for the end of 2013 my laptop broke down. So now I finally had an excuse to put the plans that I already had for a few months into practice. The basic plan was to install Windows and Linux in parallel on the same machine and then do some fancy stuff with it. But this time "for real" and not with the help of a Windows installer. Because some people occasionally asked me about installing operating systems (OS) and partitioning hard drives now I wrote down what I did as a summary and a rough direction guide as this is usually what I am missing when I want to try something new.

First thing to do was reinstalling the Windows OS. For that I used the built-in recovery partition of my laptop. Although I knew that this would install a whole bunch of crap programmes that I would remove immediately afterwards I wanted to keep the nice power management tools that I would have lost if I had not used the factory setting recovery. Windows easy peasy done in half an hour. ;)

Next step was preparing the hard drive for the second Linux OS. For that I added three partitions with Partition Wizard: One for the actual OS (ext4 file system), one for data (ext4 file system) and one for exchanging files between Windows and Linux (FAT32 file system). Actually this separation of OS and data is not necessary, it is more a "good style" to do it. You should do it for your Windows system as well although I did not do it for my laptop as I tend to back up everything anyway. Nevertheless I should feel bad for this inconsistency and I do. There would have been just too many partitions ... I will probably use this exchange partition as a small network hard drive as well when I am back in Sweden so that I can exchange files within the home network as well without a USB stick.

Afterwards it was time to choose one of the around 600(?) available Linux distributions ... As you only learn stuff if you do it on your own and do it properly I chose Arch Linux. This comes along with nothing except the basic Linux OS. No graphical user interface (GUI), no drivers, no internet, no nothing ... Yay, so much fun ... ;)

I burnt the Linux image to a CD (yes, my laptop is old enough that it still has a DVD drive) to boot it with ImgBurn. Before I tried to boot it from SD card but my laptop seems to refuse booting from SD card in principle. -.- So CD it was. From the Arch Linux live environment I then installed the OS onto the hard drive following this tutorial. (Actually that is all the magic behind becoming a computer "expert": Read and try.) Most of the tutorial worked fine, only for the wifi part I had to change some of the commands by trial and error - it seems that the author mixed some old commands with some new effects ...

Anyhow, afterwards I installed the GNOME GUI following the Arch Linux Wiki Beginner's Guide. This took me as long as installing the OS itself. -.- This time it was for my stupidity and impatience which is inherent to every physicist/computer scientist nursery child that always prefers trying on his own rather than following boring guides. ;)

Actually I did not want to install a GUI at all to internalise "how to command shell". ;) But then I realised that I will have to read a lot in future and that I will not always have a second machine to use a browser so I installed a GUI ... Looks really nice by the way so it pays off optically as well. And installing it teaches you a lot about how OS work. :)

Last of course (which I did before installing a GUI but you can do it afterwards as well) I needed a boot loader that recognises both the Linux and the Windows OS. I just used the standard GRUB boot loader for that. The installation guide above includes this.

So after some hours of blood, sweat and tears (and coffee) I really managed to install my favoured dual boot system. No big deal once you know how to do it but first you have to try it on your own. Mission accomplished. :)

You should try installing a dual boot system as well! ;)