davidbenari said:
@f95toli
(1) One is how hands off experimental professors are. Which is why the US system is basically a lot of foreign grad students working as slaves for 8 years and doing the grunt work the professor doesn't want to do; whereas I think the theorist professor is a lot more involved.
This happens everywhere. I am nominally an experimental physicist (in the UK) but I have been doing this for a long time now (I finished my PhD 15 years ago) and my time is -literally- too valuable for me to spend a lot of time in the lab. I have a research group to run, meetings to participate in etc. Hence, whereas I would love to to spend more time in the lab, I literally do not have time. This happens in all professions, once you get really good at something you are expected to do less hands-on work and spend more time teaching and managing others.
(2) Another example is based on the fact that in industry, e.g. the semiconductor industry, fab is relegated to technicians. Moreover, in industry they have machines that do the tedious work the grad student has to do by hand.
This is simply wrong. Or at least mostly wrong. It is true that much of the "routine fab" in industry is done by technicians but process development is still mostly done by people with PhDs. They might still have titles as "technician" (but most often it is something with "engineer" in it) but that does not mean that is is not a highly skilled profession.
Now, it is quite rare for the work done in academic groups to involve "standard" fab simply because the research for these have already been done. Mostly, we are using strange/unusual materials, have very strict demands when it comes to imperfections etc. Moreover. most fab is only done for handful of samples before you move on to the next process which means that you are always in state of developing something new. This means that nothing is ever routine. When we DO need something that is "standard" we typically just order that from a foundry; it usually doesn't make sense to develop a whole process for this.
Why? Because doing this work is a nightmare, not because its hard at an intellectual level, but because it's painfully boring. Sorry, but no matter how much you say "you are doing nanofabrication at an atomic level" diping wafers in a bucket isn't fascinating.
I can't help you there. Some people really like fab, some people hate it. If you don't like doing things with your hands it is certainly not for you. I did a bit of fab as a PhD student but it was not for me.
Also I disagree with having to "know the physical/chemical principles of how the equipment operates". In real life they just try a bunch of recipes and vary parameters systematically until they get the right fab out of the process. Sure they need some intuition, but they don't need to know much.
There is some truth in that, but in order to work efficiently you also need to be able to use and interpret data from diagnostic tools such as XRD, AFM, SEM and TEM (just to mention a few). Just varying parameters at random and until you get one good sample CAN work, but it rarely works if you need your results to be reproducible. You also need to understand enough about materials physics so that you can optimise your films (grain boundaries etc)
I am fortunate enough to collaborate with some very good fab people and they certainly understand the physics (although most of them also do some measurements).
And I also disagree that because you're doing the design you need a deep understanding of the physics. I knew people at a top 10 school with papers in Nature and Science working on superconductivity and didn't even know what second quantization was. How is that deep understanding of the physics?
That depends on what you are doing. Someone working on superconducting devices does not need to know everything there is to know about BCS theory, but they do need to understand the physics of the device, which if you are working with superconducting devices can often be adequately modeled as a lossless metal with some kinetic inductance (and an annoying habit of trapping flux!).
As it happens I've worked on SC devices for about 20 years and my most used Hamiltonian is probably the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian (I've even published a couple of theory/modelling papers) which is what I use to model and design devices, this is probably as "advanced" as BCS theory but the difference is that I've never actually had to use anything but the results of the latter. As with most experimental physicists I've dabbled in many different fields but I've only got "deep" understand in a few very specific areas. I've e.g. also worked on electron spin resonance and know quite a lot about decoherence of electron spins in solids, but I don't claim to be an expert in atomic physics.
Besides physics that has been known for a long time that kink in the IV might barely be understood by the experimentalists in some fields. Why? It's just too hard and it takes 5+ years to understand, so instead they're just told to look for that kink and then they say the cause is "electronic correlation" or something like that. I've seen this happen a lot. Of course there is some level of analysis involved but its not as fancy as it sounds by reading paper titles and abstracts.
Then you've been unlucky. I've spent many, many hours of my life discussing kinks in IVs and so far we've always been able to eventually identify the cause for all of them;although some causes require some quite complicated physics to explain (especially some many-body effects and more recently topological effects).
Anyways, I'm pretty sure I hate fab. You might disagree on my reasons. I still love physics and want to find what fields are a right fit for me.
That is fair enough. However, it is important that you have realistic expectations. Real life physics is very different from what many people imagine it to be and mostly you are NOT "doing physics" when working as a a physicist; if you really don't like the "hand-on" routine stuff in the lab you should probably look for something else.
This is all down to personal preference and I've had seen promising students leave physics altogether after their MSc/MRes because they decided that lab work was not for them.