Sweating the (Very) Small Stuff

Science and Engineering Hall’s nanofabrication lab will mean a “completely different ballgame” for GW researchers working at the nano scale.

Research in nanotechnology is complicated, sure. But try doing it without the necessary equipment.

Earlier this year, engineering professor Can Korman, physics professor Andrei Afanasev and a doctoral student set out to build a tiny new device that may increase the efficiency of nuclear physics experiments at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, in Virginia.

But without access on campus to the kind of ultra-clean lab and nanofabrication equipment needed to build such a device, the researchers had to turn to vendors to obtain basic materials and to another university to assemble the tool from their blueprints.

Several months after the researchers began, the prototypes are now ready. It’s a process that might have taken a few weeks, at most, if done on campus.

“We still need to bring [the prototypes] back here and test them. They may be completely useless,” says Dr. Korman, associate dean for research and graduate studies at the School of Engineering and Applied Science. If tweaks are needed, he says, the process begins anew.

Soon, though, such frustrating limitations will be a thing of the past. When the Science and Engineering Hall opens its doors in early 2015 it will include a new lab for nano-scale research, an advantage hotly anticipated by a growing slate of engineers, physicists, chemists, biologists and others around the university.

“This is where innovative engineering and science is occurring now, it’s at these dimensions,” says Dr. Korman. Without capabilities to design, build and test at the nano level, a university isn’t really competing, he says. “You’re just an observer.”

In addition to opening doors to higher profile research, Dr. Korman says the lab will have the potential to attract larger amounts of research funding and create new streams of revenue, like opportunities to offer services to local industries.

The nanolab will be housed in a specially-built “clean room,” which is basically just that: an intensely clean environment in which the air is scrubbed to keep the number of contaminating particles, like dust, dead skin and hair, to a minimum (hence the characteristic head-to-toe white suits). The cleanest areas of GW’s nanolab will have no more than 100 particles larger than 0.5 microns—roughly half the width of a red blood cell—per cubic foot of air.

It’s important to filter out those particles since they’re massive compared to the devices being constructed in a nanolab. A nanometer is just one-thousandth of a micron.

For a researcher working on, say, a transistor that is 50 nanometers long, the impact of a single human hair—some 80,000 nanometers wide—will mean “you can kiss that entire experiment goodbye,” says Dr. Korman.

Developments in nanotechnology have been fueled in large part by the computer and communications industries, he says, but now also stem from a range of areas, from energy to medicine.

“There are some predictions that in the next 20 years every product sold in the United States will have a nano component of some kind,” says chemistry professor Michael Wagner. For example, nanotech might be incorporated to make a car lighter and stronger, or added to fuel to make it burn more efficiently.

In the absence of a nanolab on campus, Dr. Wagner, a materials chemist, chose to focus on research that can be achieved without one.

“If you don’t have a hammer, pick up a shoe,” he says. “There are other ways to do things.” But ultimately, “if you want to be competitive at the top level … you need the right tools.”

Michael Keidar, director of the GW Institute for Nanotechnology, says the new facility will represent “a completely different ballgame” in terms of the types of research he can pursue.

His team currently is working to understand the interaction between nanoparticles and bodily tissues, in the hopes of finding better ways to deliver drugs. But for now, team members make time-consuming trips to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Md., to utilize high-powered imaging equipment. The finished materials then are sent elsewhere to be assembled.

The Science and Engineering Hall’s nanolab will have nanofabrication equipment and sit adjacent to a new imaging suite, aiming to keep both ends of the process in-house.

In a separate area of the clean room suite, a teaching lab will provide undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to learn basic techniques through hands-on experience.

“This is really where everything’s headed, so I think this is an essential part of our educational mission,” says chemistry professor Akos Vertes, whose work includes the development of nano-sized tools for analyzing small amounts of biological material.

Dr. Keidar, of the nanotech institute, also expects the facility “will open a different level of conversation” in the recruiting of both faculty members and students.

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