Annual Report of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network

Annual Report of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network 10 month period March 1, 2010 through Dec 31, 2010 “Year 7” Cooperative Agreement: ECS-0335765 March. 2011 Participating Institutions: Arizona State University, Cornell University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Howard University, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Colorado, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Texas at Austin, University of Washington, and Washington University in St. Louis 1 National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network 2010‐11 Annual Report Executive Summary Introduction: The National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) is a collective of fourteen university‐based nanotechnology facilities with the mission to enable rapid advancements in nanoscale science, technology and engineering through open and efficient access to advanced processes, equipment, and expertise. Completing its 7th year of operation, NNIN provides a distributed facilities‐ based infrastructure resource that is openly accessible to the nation’s students, scientists and engineers from academe, small and large companies, and national laboratories. It enables the reduction of nanotechnology based ideas to practice by providing the capacity to explore materials, structures, devices and systems through access to tools, training and specialized staff support– all at affordable cost, with minimum administrative barriers and with only a few weeks of preparation following initial contact. NNIN also provides computational resources with an emphasis on advanced scientific computing and modeling at the nanoscale, Figure 1: Institutions of NNIN and the experimental research & particularly in support of experimental efforts, development usage of NNIN during 2010‐11. and in building repositories of trusted critical scientific information, e.g., interatomic and pseudopotentials. NNIN also leverages its infrastructure resources and its geographic and institutional diversity to conduct broader impact activities: in education, in enhancing diversity in technical disciplines, in societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology and in health and environment studies Three new universities were added to NNIN in 2008, expanding NNIN’s expertise in inorganic‐ NNIN Users by Institution Type March 2010‐Dec. 2010 state and fed gov pre‐college organic interfaces through Arizona State 1% 0% University, energy and precision sciences large company foreign 2 year college 3% 1% through University of Colorado and public 0% health and environment through Washington 4 year college small company 1% 12% University in St. Louis. The universities are now other university thoroughly integrated and operating as a 15% networked resource. local site academic 67% Approach and Usage: NNIN supports research by providing extensive equipment and process resources together with strong technical staff support. NNIN’s staff, made possible by the 5405 Unique Users in 10 months leverage of NSF funding, provides the training, process, and project support that are necessary for effective user access to the large instrument set of NNIN sites. Technology resources are optimized by connecting specific technical leadership offerings at a site to the intellectual strengths of the individual institutions, thus offering the most advanced knowledge and instrumentation to the user cost‐effectively. When coupled with geographic diversity, this distributed approach enables balanced NNIN FY10 Annual Report [Type text] Executive Summary 2 and broad support to the nanotechnology community with maximum efficiency and for maximum impact. Through its user program, NNIN directly impacts a significant portion of the nanotechnology research in the US. During the 10 months of operation ending December 2010, 5405 unique users performed a significant part of their experimental work at NNIN facilities. Of these, 4490 were academic users, mostly graduate students, 822 industrial users, 63 users from State and Federal laboratories, and 30 users from foreign institutions. More than 330 small companies used NNIN facilities during this period. Over 2500 publications, several of them the significant scientific and engineering highlights of the year, resulted from the work of the user community. A major task of staff of NNIN is in training of this user community, particularly graduate students from across United States, where there is a continuous and significant turnover. During the 10 month period, 1897 new users were trained across the vast instrument set, large and small, of the facilities. Figure 2: NNIN's major educational activities. Education and Outreach: NNIN has a broad portfolio of education and outreach activities, drawing on its nanotechnology strengths, its geographic and technical diversity, and its ability through this breadth and diversity to make an impact on a national scale. A broad range of National programs (Figure 2) forms the base of the NNIN education program, with those efforts supplemented by local activities reflecting the interests and individuality of the NNIN sites. NNIN, as a network and as individual sites, cooperates significantly with other national and center based nanotechnology education programs. NNIN national education programs include: (a) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) for a thorough exposure to graduate‐level research to undergraduate students across the breadth of nanosciences and engineering, (b) International Research Experience for Undergraduates (iREU) for an international laboratory exposure mentored by a senior research scientist to a select exceptional group of prior year REU students, (c) Laboratory Experience for Faculty (LEF) that brings research experience opportunity to faculty from under‐represented communities or institutions devoted to under‐represented communities, (c) Showcase for Students, which is a day‐long showcase of nanotechnology at major conferences devoted to underrepresented science and engineering students featuring hands‐on table‐top laboratory demonstrations with short lectures presented at major conferences, (d) international Winter School for Graduate Students (iWSG), which teaches an advanced emerging nanotechnology subject area to a select group of US graduate students at a 3rd world institution combined with a rural field experience to appreciate the context in which technology impacts a large portion of the world’s population, (e) Symposia ‐ four times a year on major technical themes that bring together leaders for talks and discussions with users/participants to define challenges of critical/emerging/changing areas and possible NNIN contributions to them, (f) Nanooze, a web and print science magazine for middle school children, featuring interesting content delivered in an engaging manner, in support of curriculum and enrichment activity, (f) Open Textbook, a web‐based senior/graduate level text that grows and changes with learning of the field, and ( g) Technical Workshops, which are topical and hands‐on workshops connected to research. Nearly 34,000 people NNIN FY10 Annual Report [Type text] Executive Summary 3 have participated in these events during the year, including nearly a thousand in the technically rigorous workshops and symposia. During 2010, NNIN’s symposia included two: Synergies in Nanoscale Manufacturing and Research and Interdisciplinary Challenges Beyond Moore’s Law that had a significant impact vector on federally supported research. Each brought together an invited group of leading academic and industrial researchers to examine the future of nanotechnology in these critical areas. Proceedings from both symposia are available on the NNIN web site. Local activities from NNIN include day and longer camps for middle and high school students, local outreach through workshops for teachers, school and community‐connected activities, and from Howard University, a laboratory on wheels that brings nanotechnology activities to high schools in eastern part of the country. Figure 3: Selections from two issues of Nanooze. Up to 100 thousand Computation and Modeling: As a copies of each issue of the print edition are distributed to classrooms complement to its laboratory support around the country, free of charge. resources, NNIN provides extensive computational and modeling resources in support of interdisciplinary problems that bring together theory and experiment. NNIN computational scientists (Ph.D. level, “Domain Experts”) are available to support both experienced computational scientist as well as to experimentalists new to the computational area. In such cases, a domain expert staff member can help with selecting appropriate codes and modifying open source codes to extract new or novel information. Domain experts are in residence at Harvard and Cornell for science and engineering of problems evolving from condensed matter, at Stanford for problems evolving from interfaces, molecular dynamics and materials science, and at Michigan for problems evolving from fluidics and mechanics. In addition, NNIN has been expanding its initiative of providing a repository and archive of trusted the pseudo‐potentials, interatomic potentials, input structure files, etc. This archive preserves and distributes vetted resources to computational scientists, providing a significant boost to both experienced and novice users. Nearly 300 scientific research users, most of whom are graduate students, employ NNIN computational resources.

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