Jeff Connors, Engineering Physics
Undergraduate, University of Pittsburgh
The summer of 2002 I spent 9 weeks in Augsburg, Germany studying vanadium
oxide film growth on diamond in the Uni-Augsburg physics department under Prof.
Horn. This intership was set up as a student exchange by Prof. Soffa and Prof.
Haider, both of whom I would like to thank as well as Prof. Horn for their efforts in
creating what turned out in my mind to be a very successful summer internship
program/exchange. During my time in Augsburg I stayed with a local mother and her
daughter, both of whom were very hospitable and helpful. I was provided with a
bicycle thanks to the efforts of Prof. Haider, with which I was able to travel anywhere
in Augsburg I needed to. The usage of bicycles by German citizens is much more
common than in America; this is one of the first cultural differences I noticed.
Without underemphasizing the technical things I learned this summer, the cultural
experience I found to be the most important part of the internship for me, not having
been outside of the US before. While things like American pop music and McDonalds
are just as common, in some cases more common, than in America, the attitudes of
the people about things like politics and social structure in Germany was very
different to me. Germany has many laws and restrictions on things. I was told by two
different people that in Germany “you need a license to do anything.” But these
things are all decided by a large group of people, usually their main legislative body,
and nobody like their President or Chancellor has as much power as the American
President in government. The people in general have less national pride than
Americans, an obvious result of WWII, but the average German seems to be more
politically aware and active on both a national and a global scale today. Things like
when and where people can drink alcohol or own or use a gun have different laws,
and the people in general have different attitudes about them. For example the
attitude about guns is much more in favor of prohibition in Germany, but you can go
to the local Biergarten and see teenagers having a large beer with their family. Media
coverage of issues being debated in legislature is controlled so that all issues get an
appropriate amount of coverage. Freedom of speech is something the Germans do
not consider necessary to protect to the extent the US does, but while this has
negative implications just like we as Americans are taught as children, there are also
some positive results, such as the media not being able to choose their programming
based solely upon what will “attract an audience.” I could go on to describe the
differences in American and German attitudes for a while, but in general my
impression is that while American life and the Constitution are very close to ideal in
my mind, my experience in Germany opened my eyes to some of the ways in which
our culture can sometimes be too ideal for our own good, since not enough people
actively try and control the workings of the government through lobbying and voting,
and in general being aware of things going on in their own communities.
Being in the Bavarian region of Germany, special emphasis needs to be placed on
the importance of soccer and beer. The Bayern-Munchen soccer team traditionally is
the best soccer team in Germany, which the Bavarian people are very proud of. The
World Cup is almost like a national holiday. My favorite thought on this is that
Germany allows itself a lot of national pride during the World Cup, which is nice to
see. Beer is an ancient tradition, famous in Germany in general but of great
importance in Bavaria. There were once laws about the purity of beer, and the people
are very much against any kind of restrictions on the use and sale of beer other than
with drinking and driving of course. But since children drink some beer in most
families in the region, it is not abused by people in general, since it is not taboo, no
different to many than drinking water. Also the “lederhosen” or traditional, feudal
German dress is much more easily found in Bavaria than in the rest of Germany.
I had the pleasure of visiting three of the four castles built by King Ludwig II during his
lifetime as well as a lake in the Alps, just over the Austrian border. The legend about
this king is that he was not entirely sane, and spent all the country’s money on
building these castles, which were indeed very lavish. The one he spent the most
time in was castle Chimsee, which has many gold-coated statue-fountains around it
and inside is very heavily decorated with large murals, wood carving and gold leaf.
The whole castle was a tribute to King Louis XIV of France. His last castle,
Neuschwanstein, is the famous “fairy tale” castle used as the model for the Walt
Disney logo, located high in the Alps. It was finished on the outside, but while the
inner rooms were still being constructed the late King was declared insane by his
personal psychiatrist, and therefore unfit to rule. Construction on the castle was
halted by the Bavarian government and the place was immediately turned into a
tourist attraction to try and return some of the revenue spent on the castles in the first
place. The King and his psychiatrist were both found floating in a nearby pond the
week after this incident.
Germany is also home to many very old feudal buildings, especially monasteries and
official buildings like town halls. Many larger towns and cities were once surrounded
by large walls with huge stone gates, many still standing today. Some of the
monasteries have beautiful artwork inside them, a tribute to the old wealth of the
former Papal societies. These monasteries are all still in use.
Munich is a very large tourist city. Walking down the streets one will inevitably find
people speaking English, some French, some Turkish, and always various Asian
dialects of course, and sometimes Latino. Street bands litter the city from every
imaginable corner of the world. As a result of this there are many shops on the
streets, ranging from traditional German crafts and foods and Apotheken (holistic
health centers) to the latest trends in German life as far as clothing, food, electronics,
clubs and general everyday needs. The same ancient buildings can be seen as
elsewhere in Germany, disbursed among newer buildings with new businesses.
There are bicycle lanes and pedestrian lanes astride the streets and each lane has
it’s own traffic light, strictly enforced and strictly obeyed by people walking, riding or
driving. The city is the home of the famous Deutsche Museum, which is eight large
floors of modern German technology, a tribute to the triumphs of German science
and engineering. Some very impressive displays are there, especially the aerospace
display where many relic airplanes from the first half of the 20th century hang from a
three-story high ceiling. The combustion engine display also shows a complete
evolution of engine technology from very small prototypes for cars to an extremely
large piston from a battleship engine weighing many tons, the shaft made as a single
casting.
The university system I worked in was structured differently from the American
system. The Bachelor degree doesn’t exist, or the Master’s. Only the “Diplom” and
the Doctorate. The Diplom is basically a mixture of the Bachelor and Master degrees.
It gives the student less overall class time than the Bachelor’s but more lab
experience. The students are generally a couple years older for the amount of time
they are in the university than an American would be due to a later starting time in
elementary schooling and mandatory military service for men graduating from their
pre-university schooling. The students are expected to teach themselves more in
their free time, things like homework and tests are not as common in their lecture
classes. This makes schooling very stressful at times since the students taking a final
may not know whether they are prepared for it or not and therefore have to study
everything possible to “cover their bases” and get through their exam, which may be
the sole determining factor in their grade for the course. On the bright side they don’t
have any tuition, so all students who qualify to go can go without worrying about how
they will pay for it.
My project at the Uni-Augsburg was studying the growth of vanadium oxide on
diamond, which has application for NASA since the vanadium oxide, below a certain
temperature, switches from reflecting IR radiation to absorbing. This means it can be
used to house spacecraft, since the material acts as a heat controller, absorbing the
sun’s rays when the craft gets too cold and reflecting them at higher temperatures to
keep from overheating. The grains of vanadium oxide were found to have sizes
between 10 and 200 nm in size, much smaller than the wavelength of IR radiation.
The interference due to high grain boundary density has an effect on energy
absorbtion, so larger grains were desired while maintaining a smooth growth surface.
A film growth method called Reactive Electron Beam Evaporation was used and the
parameters of growth temperature and annealing treatments were used as well as
some gold and chromium-oxide buffer layers to try and improve the film properties.
Using buffer layers didn’t seem to improve the surfaces much but the grain size could
be enlargened with an increase in growth temperature. In order to study these
phenomena I learned how to operate a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and
Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). These skills are very useful in the study of materials
and getting experience operating them was definitely a great opportunity.