Welcome Aidan and Marija!
Zero Point Motion’s first two interns have joined the lab in Bristol for the summer. Aidan and Marija are both PhD students at the University of Bristol’s Quantum Engineering Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT). They will be helping to set up new lab equipment and testing the inertial sensor chips, while finding out what it’s like to work in a tech start-up.
Marija studied electrical engineering and computer science as an undergraduate in Serbia, but was always particularly interested in photonics. She got a scholarship to do her PhD at the CDT in Bristol, and is currently in her third year there. Now that she is in the research phase of her degree, she is working in a group called Big Photon Lab. This is one of many research groups in the university’s overarching Quantum Engineering Technology Labs (QETLabs).
In her work at Big Photon Lab, Marija is helping develop integrated silicon quantum photonics, with chips using 2-micron-wavelength light. This kind of technological infrastructure will be needed to enable future scaled-up quantum devices, like quantum computers.
Earlier in her PhD, Marija got involved in outreach work and came across Lia on Twitter and on panels at events like the Bristol Quantum Information Technologies Workshop (BQIT). She resonated with issues in academia that Lia was talking about, and Marija’s supervisor put them in touch.
When Zero Point Motion established its lab space in Bristol, Marija applied for funding from the SME Internship Scheme, which supports people to do internships at small- and medium-sized enterprises. Her application was successful, and she started her internship at Zero Point Motion in June.
As new equipment arrives, such as the automated probe station for the chips, Marija will be helping to set it up, as well as helping to design experiments and decide on optimal components. She’ll also be looking at how data is logged and getting yield measurements – an indicator of how well the chips are performing, based on statistics of large numbers of them.
Marija is especially looking forward to getting a deeper understanding of how to bridge the gap from academic research to real-world applications, as commercialisation is something she already thinks about in her QETLabs research group. “The science is interesting,” she says, “but ultimately you want to be able to give something to people.”
Aidan originally did an integrated master’s course in mechanical and electrical engineering at the University of Bristol. During his degree he realised that he wanted to be doing cutting-edge research in an R&D lab at the forefront of science and technology, whether in academia or in industry.
As a step towards this, Aidan decided to pursue a PhD, and is currently in his first year at the Quantum Engineering CDT. Although he definitely wants to go into quantum technology, the field is very broad with many subdisciplines, so he isn’t sure exactly which type of tech he wants to specialise in.
In the first year of the CDT programme, students take on multiple shorter-term projects, so Aidan is using this year as an opportunity to explore different areas and to learn more of the underlying quantum physics. It’s also a chance to build relationships with different research groups and to experience what it’s like to work in different types of settings, whether academic or industrial.
Aidan’s internship at Zero Point Motion counts as one of his first-year individual research projects, and it’s the first time he has worked at a start-up, so he’s enjoying getting an insight into that as well as learning more about the technology.
Over the next few months, he will be doing thermal testing of the motion sensing chips, to understand how their performance changes depending on the temperature. He will also be coming up with ideas of how to mitigate against inaccuracies caused by temperature changes, to help the chips continue working at a high level under variable external conditions.
With three years of his PhD left, Aidan will continue to explore the wide array of quantum technology, and there’s also potential for him to continue working with Lia further down the line. “There could be scope to explore what Lia’s sensors might look like at the quantum level,” he says.