Day 12   6/15/12

We made our way to Potsdam via early morning train, arriving at the institute around 10:15. It took us a while, but we eventually found the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces and met up with Dimitriya Borisova, one of the post-doc students of Dimitry Shuriken. After a brief tour of their floor, we were allowed to go to the small conference room to set up for the presentation. At 11, the presentation began with an audience of 15 or 20 researchers, most of whom were younger than expected, in the 25-35 age range.  The presentation was approximately 20 minutes with about 10 minutes of Q and A; I was able to answer some questions or suggest answers. While most of the audience seemed to be rather intense, I spoke to many after and most were very nice and said I did a good job, so that’s probably positive. After the presentation, we were given a brief tour of their work by Dimitriya and Matias, a fellow postdoc, while Dimitriya explained some of their research in anti-corrosion. From the labspace it was easy to see that this was a top rate research facility; one such example would be that they had an operational Langmuir-Blodgett Trough and the most intense sonicator that I’ve ever seen. Actually, it was so awesome that I’m not sure you can just call it a simple sonnictor anymore. Like, a sound pistol. Or something that sounds cooler than that. Moving on, their labs that I toured were mostly that relating to Dr. Shuriken and his research team, and as such were mainly concentration towards anticorrosion with both academic and industrial aims. One of the unrelated labs that we stopped by was one they jokingly referred to as ‘The bubble lab’, where the researcher focused on monitoring the spectroscopic significance and refraction angles of bubbles for use in things I didn’t understand beyond that.

Additional reasons this place was cool: free water and terrariums in the hallway.

Also, something to comment on would be how excessively NOT pretentious these people were. The way they spoke and acted seemed to down-play how awesome it was that they worked at a first-class research institute.

(For those who are interested, a Langmuir-Blodgett Trough is essentially a machine credited with pioneering the field of nanoassembly. It is acclaimed for providing a way to assemble single-molecule layer deposition with an extremely specific and controlled composition. This is done by having a trough filled with water with a thin, evenly dispersed layer of the desired molecule floating on top (the perfect amount is present so that the layer is one-molecule thick). An oppositely charged substrate is then dipped via a mechanical arm into the liquid as a barrier sitting in the trough moves simultaneously to push the layer of surface molecules so that it remains one molecule thick. In this way, the layers are able to be attracted to each other and assemble via opposite charges. (Vertical lift and horizontal lift are two different techniques for the dipping of a deposition wafer in and out of the Langmuir-Blodgett water trough. This machine was equipped to do both.) Due to the extreme precision required by the instrument, Langmuir-Blodgett Troughs are extremely delicate and expensive. They fell out of favor as an assembly method due to various reasons, including the cost and the inability to self-fix defects created by the alternating tilts of the molecules during assembly, which makes them unfeasible for the creation of bioelectronics (a 5% production rate as the layers go up).