Nanostructures and nanoelectromechanical devices for precise control of topological defects/matter in superfluid helium

Since Richard Feynman's famous talk There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom in 1959, the following decades saw the booming of nanotechnology. One of the fields in which nanotechnology can never be ignored is the development of scientific instruments. Scientific instruments based on nanotechnology have revolutionized many research fields.

However, using current instruments to study superfluid He is still challenging, especially for the topological defects (TDs) and topological matter (TM) because the scale of the coherence length of the interesting objects in 3He is just tens of nanometers.

The N2PCON (Nanostructures and Nanoelectromechanical devices for Precise CONtrol of topological defects/matter in superfluid He) project will offer a nanotechnology solution to precisely control and study TDs and TM.

In this action, I will work in the OtaNano (Finnish national infrastructure for nanoscience and nanotechnology) at Aalto University, with the supervision of Dr. Sami Franssila (Department of Chemistry and Materials Science) and Dr. Vladimir Eltsov (Department of Applied Physics).

At the same time, I will also work with my secondment institutes, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK and Lancaster University, UK, to boost this action.

The action will produce nanoscale instruments (NEMS, nanostructures) that surpass the current state-of-the-art devices, in both performance and dimension, to reach the quantum world of TDs and TM.

N2PCON is expected to provide new tools for superfluid research and also add general knowledge to MEMS/NEMS and cosmology. In the long term, it will boost the MEMS/NEMS research and industry in the EU.