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Ragnar Holm Fellowship awarded to Nikolai Chekurov, KTH-EE-MST

Published Oct 25, 2012

During a seminar on Wednesday, October 24, 2012, the recipient of the 2011 Postdoctoral Fellowship in honor of the physicist Ragnar Holm, Dr. Nikolai Chekurov, was formally awarded with the silver plate of the Ragnar-Holm foundation.

Gunnar Lager hands over the silver plate from the Ragnar Holm foundation.
Gunnar Lager hands over the silver plate from the Ragnar Holm foundation to Nikolai Chekurov.

Dr. Chekurov gave a talk on his PhD work, entitled “Fabrication Process Development for Silicon Micro and Nanosystems”, on fabrication techniques for manufacturing silicon micro devices with sub-micron features. He concentrated on methods developed during his work at Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University), including electron beam lithography, focused ion beam processing, atomic layer deposition and cryogenic deep reactive ion etching. The presented techniques are suitable for many applications which require nanometre resolution, for example, it can be used for fabrication of micro and nanoelectromechanical systems or photonic and plasmonic devices.

Dr. Chekurov also presented an outline of his post-doc work at the Microsystem Technology Laboratory, supervised by Assoc.-Prof. Joachim Oberhammer. The project will utilize novel microwave metamaterial geometries, enabled by distributed tunable microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and aiming at demonstrating new functionality for millimeter-wave devices and systems.

The seminar was attended by the members of the Ragnar Holm Committee, Alex Grishin, Gunnar Lager and Christofer Leygraf, as well as many researchers from different parts of KTH working on micro- and nanosystem technology.

About the Ragnar-Holm Fellowship

Ragnar Holm is regarded as the scientific founder of the research dealing with electric contacts, and wrote a book "Electric Contacts", which was first published some 70 years ago. After several editions it is still regarded as the most important reference book of the field.

The recipient of the Postdoctoral Fellowship is expected to join an existing research group at KTH in a relatively broad field, encompassing Engineering Physics and related subjects, or the History of Science and Technology. Preference is given to areas close to Ragnar Holm’s scientific activities or the history thereof, such as the theory of electric contacts, novel applications of electric phenomena as well as friction, wear, fritting, corrosion and tarnish phenomena on electric contacts and related devices. The duration of the postdoctoral stay is a minimum of one year and a maximum of two years.

Christofer Leygraf, Gunnar Lager and Alex Grishin give a copy of Ragnar Holms book "Electric Contacts" to Nikolai Chekurov.
Christofer Leygraf, Gunnar Lager and Alex Grishin give a copy of Ragnar Holms book "Electric Contacts" to Nikolai Chekurov.