Intern Review Shobhna Misra UCL

Intern Experiences Summer 2018

University College London

Shobhna Misra

Hello, I am Shobhna Misra, currently pursuing my final year of BTech in EP. I did my intern at London Center for Nanotechnology, which is a facility jointly owned by University College London (UCL) and Imperial College London (ICL) in my summer. I was in the UCL campus. A snap of the UCL main quad dome-

Don’t mind the cranes, they spoilt all my pics :(

Now, something about how I got there. Well, I did try to start my Intern apping in December. I sent a few mails and did get some positive and some semi-positive replies. I was mainly apping in Elec (Power Elec and stuff, because I thought my work at Racing would help me secure an intern in that field…) But the hardware projects I got (well, because I am not really enthu about software) did not really catch my fancy. (Of course, I did receive some negative replies too, and I really owe it to the seniors and friends who kept boosting my morale when I absolutely needed it.) At this point of time, I thought of pausing Apping and first trying to figure out what I would like. I took up a project with Prof. Suddhasatta Mahapatra in January to explore Quantum Computing more. It was end of January when I decided to app in Experimental Quantum Computing. I sent one mail, no reply. Second mail, no reply. One fine Friday evening in mid-February, I had given up so much that I scheduled 7 mails at a time (scheduled them for Monday morning) and went off to sleep. Fast forward to Monday. One of the Profs had read my mail 5-6 times (Yes, I am guilty of using Streak to track my emails). The others had not read my mails at all. Disheartened, I shut down my laptop and went to set an alarm. At that very moment, I got a reply! I sat bolt upright, opened my laptop and read the mail again. The Prof. wanted to know what kind of funding I would require, and after 2-3 emails, he agreed to reimburse my travel and accommodation costs with receipts. Later, he also agreed to give me a decent enough amount for food expenses (unreceipted). So yeah, I was all set for London! :D

Let me now give a glimpse of the work I did. Oh, before that, there were a few courses that turned out to be really helpful. Molecular Spectroscopy, QIC and Intro to CMP were the most useful ones. My project mainly revolved around building a spectrometer for use in experiments. I spent the first week familiarising myself with the lab and the instruments to be used. Luckily for me, the Prof. was getting three new dilution refrigerators in my second week. So I spent the next 2-3 weeks helping out with setting up of the fridges. It was a lot of fun!! I mean, who isn’t intrigued by a fridge that goes down to mK!? I learnt stuff about which part of a dilution refrigerator does what and how they all function together. In the next few weeks, I learnt some microwave electronics and did some coding to control some instruments and make them do stuff when they are plugged into experiments. I used python and QCoDeS for the same. I learnt a ton of stuff in the process. I got to talk to the group members and get to know what they work on. Not only that, I got to attend three UCLQ seminars, one by Prof. Nir-Bar Gill from Israel, who spoke on NV Centers in diamond, how they are used as qubits, challenges involved; one by Prof. Yasunobu Nakamura, who gave a wonderful talk on superconducting qubits and one by Prof. Jason Petta, who explained to us some of his recent work on spin qubits in semiconductors and what difficulties are on our way while fabricating multiple quantum dots in an array.

Apart from the work, I liked how the group sat down together for lunch. It was a refreshing break from work and I got to know them a lot better!

And well, I learnt a lot more than what I had expected. The dilution refrigerators happened to arrive at the right time! I had expected some hardware and coding work, which is what I got.

Now, obviously I did not spend the entire time working. I had my share of fun in London! (I also sneaked out to Oxford one weekend). I’d rather put in photos than explain…