This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This award will provide support for the renovation of laboratory space for the establishment of the Nanostructured Materials Growth and Metrology Laboratories (MIT NanoMat Labs) that will be housed within the NSF Center for Materials Science and Engineering (CMSE) at MIT. The renovated 2,900 square foot MIT NanoMat Labs will be part of the 200,000 square foot NSF CMSE. The renovated space will support a MIT-wide shared facility for processing and analysis facilities, which include wet lab, cleanroom, specialized instruments and research space. The materials growth portion of the facility is expected to support a unique multi-chamber integrated materials growth system for the deposition of multi-nanostructured thin films, spun-cast polymers, e-beam evaporated metals, stamp-printed quantum dots and sputter deposited semiconducting and insulating dielectrics. Scientists will be studying physical phenomena, materials structures and chemistries, and demonstrations of practical nanostructured devices that exceed the current state-of-the-art science and technologies. The metrology portion of the renovated facility will contain a suite of equipment to characterize optical and electrical properties of nanostructured photovoltaics, fuel cells, batteries, and solid-state lighting structures.
The proposed NanoMat Labs could provide a centralized set of research facilities in the campus aimed at enabling growth and metrology of nanostructured materials, and is expected to foster collaborative interactions among nine research groups at MIT. It is expected that the facility would be used by over 70 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows from the above research groups, and 5 to 10 associated undergraduates. Additionally, the facility will also be used by high-school teachers and students.
It is now well appreciated that the need for sustainable, low environmental impact energy is a critical challenge facing the United States now and in the future. Key to meeting this challenge is the development of new energy-focused materials and the fundamental science and engineering underlying their properties. Given the complexities involved in developing and understanding these advanced materials, a multi-interdisciplinary approach involving scientists from many complementary fields is clearly needed. Likewise, specialized processing tools and measurement equipment located in dedicated shared experimental facilities are needed to fabricate and test suitable devices from these materials. Using funds from the NSF Academic Research Infrastructure Program, MIT has established, for the first time, a fully dedicated suite of shared experimental facilities that is directed towards the development of nanostructured materials in energy related technologies, with a major focus on photovoltaic structures, batteries, fuel cells, and high efficiency solid-state lighting. Funds from this program and MIT were used to renovate 3330 sq. ft. of wet lab, clean room and research space thereby establishing the MIT Nanostructured Materials Growth and Metrology Laboratories (NanoMat Labs). The extensive processing equipment and energy-focused metrology tools housed in the new facilities were primarily supported by funds provided by industry. Since the completion of the laboratory renovations (October 2012), the new NanoMat labs have enabled a large number of wide-ranging interdisciplinary collaborations involving more than 23 different MIT research groups, 90 individual users and more than 6,907 hours of instrument use. The cross-disciplinary research efforts of these researchers have focused on such important fundamental issues as the development of efficient energy conversion and storage technologies based on nanostructured materials and investigations of electronic/excitonic processes at the nanoscale. The newly renovated labs are also being used by undergraduates for both research projects and as part of an undergraduate lab class. Thus, the new NanoMat labs are helping to educate the next generation of MIT scientists. The new facility has also benefited a local start-up company by providing a capability that simply does not exist in any commercial setting. Users of these new facilities report that access to state-of-the-art tools and other researchers who have expertise in energy related materials development has been extremely beneficial to their research. To date, results generated in these new facilities have help to support the publication or preparation of 12 scientific papers and 3 conference proceedings. Many more are expected in the future. In short, the promise of this multi-user shared NanoMat research facility, namely the enablement of high impact collaborative research with a focus on energy related challenges, has already been realized and is expected to continue for many years ahead. Thus, the seed planted by funding from the Academic Research Infrastructure Program of NSF has created a unique shared experimental facility with the potential to address many critical fundamental research challenges facing this nation.
