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I have been working with a chamber that creates beams of atoms in a vacuum for 4 years. We use these beams to create different and new materials- from tiny wires to sheets of materials to boulder type shapes. We do everything in a chamber with no air in it so that we get the purest material and we have the most control over what we are growing. The machine is called a Molecular Beam Epitaxy Chamber, but we like to call her Martha. Me and my other students follow a sample through the whole process, we grow it, look at its properties, create tiny circuits with them and finally see how electricity passes through them in different conditions.

I run the lab so in the morning I have to make sure that all the pumps are running as they should and machine is running safely. If I am in the lab that day I will wash all my samples and load them into the chamber, heat up my samples before I open them up to the beams of molecules. This cleans them but also makes sure that the molecules have enough energy to create the best material. We have 4 pumps, 3 beams of molecules and a plasma beam to monitor so a lot of my time is spent checking these are working or adjusting them. Many of the machines I work on are similar in that you set up what you want to do, like a recipe, and then the rest of the time you monitor to make sure it runs well. Robots can only do so much!