Brian Mavity's Report

When I first heard that I was going to get the opportunity to go to China for summer research, I was ecstatic. By having such high expectations, it becomes very easy to be disappointed. The actual trip far exceeded anything that I could imagine. Not only did I get to continue my research, I was able to meet many intelligent people and was introduced to various experiments in other areas of the semiconductor physics field. We toured the physics department at Beijing University and Chinese Physics Institute. On top of all this, we got to see many of the cultural treasures from Chinese history including the Great Wall.

Although the sightseeing and tours were very interesting, my main goal for the trip was to make some significant progress on my research project. I was excited to learn that I was going to work with a graduate student from the Chinese Academy of Semiconductors. His name is De-Yu Lu, and he was a great help. We had discussions on the theory of my project as well as sharing in the debugging of code that I had previously used to obtain results for the 100th Anniversary American Physical Society Conference in March of 1999. We had a small bug in our code that was fixed within the first two days of work in China. With the bug in our code fixed, we decided to concentrate on making it readable and more flexible. By the time we were ready to leave, we were using the program to simulate Si quantum dots. Simulating Si was very advantageous because there was an experimentalist doing Raman scattering and we were able to compare our results to his. Unfortunately, the trip had come to an end and the results were inconclusive at that time.

Even though our research did not get finished, I feel that my experiences in China will stay with me for the rest of my life. I can't thank Dr. Ren enough for imagining that we could make this trip. I would also like to thank the NSF for their support, the Chinese Institute of Semiconductors for allowing me to use their facilities and De-Yu Lu for his help with my project.