Mayer designed the chamber as part of the “3D Matter Made to Order” excellence cluster, where KIT researchers collaborate with the University of Heidelberg and are supported by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. He published the results of his work in “Science Advances” magazine.
Mayer says he worked solidly for an entire year to develop the chamber. The main challenge was the small space he had to work with. While developing the chamber, he often realized that things didn’t go as planned. For example, he initially used transparent silicon to build several chambers. But, they weren’t viable as they could not be resealed. “While I was able to print the security features onto one chamber, I was unable to remove them. Clearly, that wasn’t the best approach,” he says with a smile. Then, the photoresist hardened while still in a valve, presumably due to heat build-up, and the valve sprang a leak. So Mayer switched to a different type of valve.
When you think about and tweak things a lot, you have to be able to stand back and look at the big picture now and again. When he’s not in the lab, Mayer is normally outdoors swimming in the lakes around Karlsruhe or hiking in the Black Forest. Sometimes, he spends his vacation cycling through the Alps.