Holly's project aims to address technological choices and elements of design, through changes in component materials, their treatment and the vessel morphology of transport amphorae from Attica, Greece, from the early third millennium BCE to the 9th century CE; including a focus on ceramic production in south-western Attica. The combination of petrographic, compositional and computational analytical techniques will help to understand continuity and change in the choice and manipulation of raw materials, techniques of forming and construction, surface modification and firing. Contextualising this within a social world and taking an archaeologically and anthropologically informed approach will enable a long-term perspective on the design and technology of transport amphorae to be developed and applied. At Demokritos, Holly has begun her training in thin section petrography, finite element analysis, experimental approaches and concepts of testing strength and toughness using 3D scanning and digital modelling of objects. Holly has started to think about the contextualisation of these maritime transport containers within the wider social world.

The Doctoral Thesis is conducted in the context of the SMART-X program (HORIZON 2020/Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (MSCA-ITN) - Grant Agreement No 860553), which studies carrier transport phenomena in materials by time-resolved ultrashort soft X-ray light. My contribution to the above-mentioned program revolves around the epitaxial growth, characterization and study of the properties of 2D films of the family of transition metal dichalcogenides with possible non-trivial topological properties. These materials exhibit various particularities in the 2D limit, which are of interest both for fundamental research and for applications (electronics/spintronics, optoelectronics, magnetic, photovoltaic devices etc.).

The materials will be grown mainly by Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) and they will be characterized by a variety of in situ surface methodologies, such as Reflection High-Energy Electron Diffraction (RHEED), Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM), X-ray/UV Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS/UPS) and Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES), with the aim to evaluate their crystalline structure and quality, as well as their physical and electronic properties. Their electronic band structure will be simulated by first principles DFT calculations.

The growth of these materials and a first characterization will be performed at the Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology of N.C.S.R. Demokritos. Further characterization and investigation of the properties of the optimal materials will be supported through secondments that will take place in other members of the SMART-X network (indicatively CNR-IFN, ICFO, ELETTRA/FERMI FEL).