Within the scope of an ERC Starting Grant, Dr. Kaspars Dadzis of the Leibniz-Institut für Kristallzüchtung (IKZ) is reviving the original crystal growth experiment, introduced over a hundred years ago by the chemist Jan Czochralski. The goal of his project NEMOCRYS (Next Generation Multiphysical Models for Crystal Growth Processes) is to describe the fundamental physics behind this process and to develop new, reliable models for crystal growth. We talked with Kaspars about his passion for fundamental physics and unique opportunities that ERC Starting Grant offers to a junior researcher.
When was your first contact with the subject of crystal growth, and why did it attract you?
It was already in the second year of my bachelor studies at the University of Latvia in Riga. Professor Andris Muižnieks, who was reading lectures in electromagnetism, mentioned an opportunity for students to work in applied physics in his group. I started with simple programming tasks for modeling of silicon crystal growth and then did my bachelor and masters theses on this topic. I got interested as a physicist because crystal growth has all these physical topics, which you learn in your studies: hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, continuum mechanics. I saw that I could apply in practice all the things that I learned in theoretical studies. That was fascinating! I still find it fascinating: in the ERC project, as a physicist, I am focusing on the multi-physical aspect of crystal growth.
You did your PhD in the SolarWorld company in Freiberg, where you subsequently stayed for four years. Why did you decide to leave the industry and go back to do academic research at the IKZ?
When you work in the industry, you are focused on optimizing some specific properties of the end product, in this case, solar cells. There are quite limited resources to pursue scientific topics. SolarWorld was great in this sense, it gave me a lot of freedom: I could do large projects with universities about model experiments. Still, at some point, I saw that if I want to go deeper into science, I cannot do this in industry. Because the goals – and the resources, which you get to pursue those goals – are still focused on the product you need to sell.