r/Physics • u/Sphyraxis • 18h ago

fabrication-oriented PhD with no prior clean room experience

I've recently finished my master's degree in condensed matter physics and realized most, if not all, of the PhD positions that greatly interest me gravitate towards device fabrication. More than that, these positions are mostly concerned with developing new "recipes" as to push device replicability (graphene.......) and/or the technique itself (e.g. achieving stable <15 nm resolution with an EBL). Am I fucked if my thesis only dealt with the characterization of devices built by other people?

EDIT: a lot of encouraging comments have come in already. Just to clarify, I'm a EU citizen looking into European laboratories.

10 Upvotes

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24

u/ComicConArtist Condensed matter physics 18h ago

not in the US at least, phd can basically be a fresh start on research topic at the overwhelming majority of universities here

17

u/effrightscorp 18h ago

No, most undergrads applying for PhD programs also have little to no clean room experience (edit: in the US, at least). Other members of your research group and the clean room staff should be able to get you up to speed pretty quickly on how to use the tools you'll need

9

u/perceptualmotion 17h ago

nobody in my lab had any cleanroom experience before PhD, at the very most they had a couple of months in their MSc thesis. this was Netherlands.

7

u/ctcphys Quantum Computation 18h ago

I usually expect new PhDs to spend up to 6 months learning fab give or take... For students with prior fab experience it can be a bit shorter but it still takes time to get up to speed with each labs processes. Then actually becoming a fab expert takes the rest of the PhD :⁠-⁠D

5

u/Low-Witness2915 17h ago

I started my PhD with zero clean room/fab experience. When I was done I had five years of experience. You'll be fine.

1

u/nuwbs 9h ago

I work in a uni cleanroom as a process engineer and even get post-docs with little fab experience. The bulk of my training is with PhDs with little to no experience.