Synthesis of crystal phase quantum dots in III-V nanowires
Supervisor: Maryam Sadeghiyan and  Federico Panciera 
Starting date: February 2027

Superconductor/semiconductor hybrids are key building blocks for gate-tunable qubits, topological superconductivity and cryogenic Josephson electronics. Their performance depends on a clean, epitaxial interface. This interface is best obtained by growing the metal without breaking vacuum, but patterning the metal afterwards by etching damages the semiconductor. In this internship, the student will fabricate free-standing SiN stencil masks in the C2N cleanroom. With these masks, they will deposit Al or Nb at low temperature onto in-situ grown III-V semiconductors in the Octoplus MBE cluster, so that the metal pattern is defined directly during growth. The student will then use SEM, AFM, XRD and TEM to measure the resolution, edge definition and epitaxial quality that the method can reach

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In-situ TEM Growth of Chiral Tellurium Nanowires
Supervisor: Federico Panciera 
Starting date: February 2027

Tellurium is a chiral elemental semiconductor built from helical atomic chains. This structure gives it strong spin–orbit coupling, anisotropic transport and chiral optical responses, which makes it a promising material for spintronics. Te nanowires can be grown with good crystal quality, but how they nucleate and grow, and what sets their orientation and handedness, is still poorly understood at the atomic scale. In this internship, the student will study the growth of free-standing Te nanowires on silicon by in-situ transmission electron microscopy, using the MBE-equipped NanoMAX microscope. Watching nucleation and growth in real time will show how temperature, flux and the silicon surface control nanowire diameter, growth direction and chirality. The student will take part in the in-situ experiments and develop image-processing tools in Python to extract nanowire geometry from the videos. They will then use this data to link growth conditions to morphology, with the aim of finding ways to control the orientation and handedness of Te nanowires for chiral spintronic devices.

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