Lab exchange grant: UCL epitaxial growth capabilities for quantum structures

Mehdi on an MBE lab tour of UCL's epitaxial growth capabilities.

Mehdi Ahmadian PhD student at the University of Manchester was awarded an M4QN laboratory exchange award to visit Huiyun Liu at UCL. The visit took place in March 2025.

The purpose of the visit

The visit allowed Mehdi to discuss potential collaboration opportunities between UCL and his group at the Photon Science Institute (PSI). The visit provided Mehdi with the opportunity to tour UCL’s facilities and become familiar with the capabilities they have as well as attend meetings and discussions with UCL members.

Mehdi writes “It was very insightful because their research field and capabilities are directly related to my PhD project. My project is about engineering epitaxial quantum dots and the main expertise of Huiyun’s group is the growth epitaxial QD wafers. Thus, great insight has been achieved about the opportunities and practical limitations of such nanoscale structures. I also learnt about the unique twin-chamber MBE system that allows epitaxial growth possibility of III-V material and group IV material. In addition, we talked about characterisation capabilities useful for QDs such as PL, AFM and TEM. In summary, it was a very beneficial and insightful visit for me due to its high relevancy.”

Huiyun Liu and Mehdi Ahmadian after a meeting where they discussed the capabilities and collaboration opportunities between Manchester and UCL.

Benefits to the UK materials and quantum community

Mehdi writes: “The home page of the M4QN website shows this message in bold: Bringing together the UK’s materials and quantum technologies communities. And that is what this lab exchange program exactly did. Both our group in Manchester and Huiyun’s group at UCL are doing a lot of interesting research in the field of quantum materials. However, despite several opportunities, they are working separately. Such lab exchange funds can be very effective in building the bridge between different research groups across the UK. This is especially valuable when PhD students and early career researchers are getting involved because they are willing to not only know about capabilities within the UK relevant to their research but also are highly motivated to expand their network. For example, after the meetings and discussions, I met several new researchers in the field and also we started a collaborative project in the field of epitaxial QDs. Hence, I strongly believe the UK quantum material community will gain high benefits from such investments in young researchers.”

Visit outcomes

Following the short lab visit, several outcomes have been achieved from new collaboration and capabilities to networking and more lab visits. The two groups learnt that there is equipment and capabilities in each institution that are needed by the other, and the possibility of accessing each others tools has been discussed. A new collaborative project has been started between the two institutions and members from UCL will visit the PSI for a lab tour which may lead to more future collaborations.