PhD work

''Do a PhD'' I said, ''It'll be easy'' I said, hah, what was I thinking. Despite this PhD-malarkey being far more complex than I first anticipated I'm actually enjoying it. SHOCKING.

Yes, it's difficult to get experiments working and yes everything that can go wrong usually does, but it's all worth it, for the single moment of when something does work you can stand back and say ''I did that, me, no one else'' I guess this is something anyone can say about their own work, but I guess that's the point, it's your own work, so be proud of it. That's what I'm trying to do at least.

See look, I made a thing to the left... It's not really much, but it's a thing I made and tells a story.

What is that story I hear you ask?

Well let me explain.

This is the basis of my whole PhD, making a nanotube, a template for generating wires within these tubes, and I find it interesting. To me this is important, I want to generate wires within these tubes, confining the growth of a crystal structure can lead to changes in the structure of the material giving it new properties from the bulk. These quantum confined wires have a diamter on the order of the unit cell, that's just a couple of atoms across, so right at the limit of what's possible.