I finished my secondment just in time before the outbreak of the Covid19 pandemic crisis in Finland on the 13th of March and thanks to the Embassy of France in Helsinki, I managed to come back home before the border closures. Technically, my lockdown has started roughly 10 days ago in Grenoble. I worked basically on 3 projects during my secondment in parallel: improving quasiparticle relaxation on a hybrid single-electron transistor, measuring electron-phonon coupling constant of thin AlMn films and fabricating Coulomb blockade thermometers (CBTs) for high-temperature thermometry during my secondment in Aalto University. I should note that without receiving extensive help from Prof. Pekola, Dr. Peltonen, Marco (Ph.D. student), ESR4 (Bayan), ESR5 (Rishabh) and other group members, it might not have been possible to accomplish my projects from both scientific and technological perspectives. Now I have a bunch of data both from my secondment, and my old experiment in Grenoble, which has to be analyzed during this lockdown.
By the way, the Paris landmark also had a message for the broader French public last night:
Lights spelled out “Merci,” French for "Thank you,” and “Stay at home” in English along with the tower’s famous sparkling illuminations.