Seed Funding Webinar - Towards self-driving thin-film synthesis of 2D Materials

Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) is a gold-standard technique for the fabrication of high-quality thin films and devices spanning semiconductors, oxides, quantum materials, and 2D materials. Utilising the vacuum deposition of elemental sources under precisely controlled conditions, MBE offers exceptional flexibility for materials discovery and optimisation. That same flexibility, however, creates a vast experimental parameter space, making optimisation a slow and labour-intensive process.

AI-assisted experimentation has the potential to transform this workflow by accelerating the exploration of growth conditions and enabling more autonomous materials synthesis. Realising this vision, however, requires advances in instrumentation, data infrastructure, and real-time analysis. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts, supported by the April AI Hub, to make the MBE systems at the University of St Andrews “AI-ready”. I will focus on the development of distributed instrument control, automated digital logging of experimental data, and machine-learning approaches for analysing in situ growth diagnostics: key building blocks on the path towards self-driving thin-film synthesis.

Bio

Prof. Phil King is a condensed matter physicist at the University of St Andrews. He obtained his PhD in surface physics from the University of Warwick in 2009, following which he undertook postdoctoral research at St Andrews and then Cornell University. He returned to St Andrews in 2013, where he leads a group focused on the growth and spectroscopic characterisation of quantum and two-dimensional materials.