Question: How many nano devices have you made altogether?

Daisy Shearer answered on 25 Mar 2022:

Great question! And one that’s a little tricky to answer as most of the nanodevices I’ve made so far have been prototypes so I’m not sure they ‘count’. But if we are counting them then it’s approaching 50 attempts at creating different geometries 😊 Some of them work electrically and some of them don’t but a bit of trial and error is part of the process!

Here’s an example of what one of my prototype devices looks like:

This image was taken using something called a scanning electron microscope which allows us to see things at a much smaller scale than an optical microscope like the ones you might have used at school. It basically shoots a beam of electrons at the surface you’re taking a picture of and then detects the electrons that have been scattered by the surface which lets us build up the image!

The scale bar there is 100um which is around the thickness of a human hair so those channels that I’ve dug out are incredibly tiny (a few 10s of nm wide)! Those blobs are where I attach incredibly thin gold wires to the device so that I can pass electricity through the device and measure things like voltages and current across different ‘arms’.