Visit to Wuhan University of Technology

I had the pleasure of visiting Wuhan University of Technology to see the WUT/Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory, the Optoelectronics Lab as well as a sit-down meeting with the heads of the new R&D/Innovation centre for automotive vehicles (site to be built in the coming years). 

Firstly I met Prof. Lin Xu, a highly accomplished materials synthesis & processing scientist with 5 years working at Harvard! His work on kinked free-standing nanowire transistors for probing inside biological cells is really fascinating; you can read their Nature Nano paper here. He also works on Sodium ion re-chargeable batteries; they are experts in nanofab using MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) engineering techniques but have to be careful not to let air interact with their batteries to avoid explosions! I am interested in collaborations to use their fabrication techniques for my optomechanical sensors. 

I then went to the Optoelectronics lab and met Associate Prof. Ku Zhiliang  and his collegue to talk about more optical-like clean room devices. They specialise in thin film solar cells (getting up to 21% conversion efficiency). They use a femtosecond laser for vaporising tunnels into their stacked layers to make junctions which is really interesting for fabrication! You can read about some of his work in Scientific Reports here.