Molecular Beam Epitaxy & The Artificial Leaf

What is MBE?

Above, you see me operating a Veeco GEN-II Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) system. MBE is a method of growing extremely high quality crystals, which are needed to study quantum mechanical phenomena in solids. The materials grown by MBE are extremely pure because only ultra high purity material sources are used and the system is kept at vacuum pressures of 1e-10 Torr, which is approximately the pressure at low earth orbit. Several Nobel prizes in Physics were made possible because of MBE. 

What did I do? An Artificial Leaf?

Growing a device and getting it to work feels almost magical. I grew gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride nanowire crystals with MBE (and helped with its maintenance!) for a year and I worked at a wet chemistry lab for over three years. This experience has been very helpful to me as a theorist/computational scientist. After growth, I would load the nanowires with metal nanoparticles (using wet chemistry and Atomic Layer Deposition) to create artificial leaves that absorb sunlight to generate renewable fuels from water and carbon dioxide. This process is known as Artificial Photosynthesis. The work I did as an experimentalist contributed to publications in Nature Communications, the Journal of Physical Chemistry C, ACS Energy Letters, and Energy & Environmental Science. My honours thesis lead to a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.