Facilities

Harvard University

The Whitesides Laboratory at Harvard occupies ~6,000 square feet, configured for organic and physical chemistry, materials science, condensed matter physics, and biochemistry. Polymer and small-molecule synthesis facilities include an inert atmosphere box, photoreaction chambers, voltage sources, a galvanostat for electrodeposition, high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) system, plasma oxidizers, vacuum ovens, rotary evaporators, centrifuges, and a spin-coater. Voltage sources, electrometers, Faraday cups, a galvanostat, a Kelvin force microscope, and 3 capillary electrophoresis devices are on-hand for generating, and characterizing electric charges. Two optical tables equipped with laser sources, filters, mirrors, and high-resolution micromanipulation devices are available for optical experiments. The range of available equipment needed for modifying and characterizing surfaces includes optical, fluorescent, and confocal microscopes, multiple scanning probe microscopes (Digital Instruments Dimension 3100 and Bioscope, equipped for most scanning probe modalities, including Kelvin force microscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy), two optical tables for optical experiments, thermal evaporator, surface plasmon resonance apparatus, ellipsometer, quartz-crystal microbalance, and UV/Vis and FT-IR spectrometers. Microfabrication is carried out using both photolithographic and soft-lithographic methods.

The Suo Group has extensive computational resources, including workstations at the Solid Mechanics Computation Cluster (IBM, Sun) with access to software, including ABAQUS for finite element analysis.

Multiple shared facilities at Harvard University are contained within the Center for Imaging and Mesoscale Structures (CIMS), and the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). Harvard’s NSF-sponsored MRSEC and CIMS are designed for micro- and nanofabrication and processing, as well as imaging. The Centers maintain state-of-the-art equipment for fabrication and characterization, including a Raith ultra-high resolution electron beam lithography apparatus (charge imprinting), a Heidelberg Instruments DWL 66 mask writer, an FEI DualBeam focused ion beam tool, class 10,000 and class 100 clean rooms, photolithographic equipment, PAR 174 polarograph, 371 potentiostat, Tencor profilometer, metal deposition devices (electron-beam and multiple thermal evaporators), isothermal titration microcalorimeter (Microcal), and instruments for metrology (e.g. TEM, SEM, ESEM, SPM, FT-IR, XPS, and variable-angle, multiple-wavelength ellipsometry). The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology offers access to NMR spectrometers (2 x 500 MHz, 2 x 400 MHz, and 300 MHz, solid-state), mass spectrometers (CI, MALDI-TOF, ESI), ESR and AA spectrometers, and a single-crystal X-ray diffraction apparatus.

Princeton University

Facilities at Princeton University contain a broad range of chemical synthesis and processing equipment along with associated characterization capabilities for ceramic, metallic, and organic materials. The Electrohydrodynamic Laboratory includes: (i) a fully equipped constant temperature laboratory for experiments on and characterization of colloidal particles (electrophoretic mobility, hydrodynamic size, dielectric spectroscopy), (ii) a high voltage electrohydrodynamics laboratory (power supplies, calibration and measuring instruments, computer image analysis), and (iii) light microscopes, digital cameras, and image analysis software for tracking particle motion. The Ceramic Materials Laboratory contains a soft-wall C1000 clean room facility enclosing an automated tape caster for microscale fabrication of laminated structures. Fabrication equipment includes stereolithography (3DSystems) and micrometer-resolution laser drilling. Characterization equipment includes a Tescan SEM, Nicolet FTIR spectrophotometer and microscope, extensive optical microscopy facilities (including transmissive and reflective instruments by Zeiss and Leitz), Rheometrics rheometer and simultaneous thermal analyzer, Digital Instruments atomic force microscope, Nanoscope Brewster angle microscope, ferroelectric tester, and Brookhaven Instrument Corporation quasi-elastic light scattering. The Tescan SEM is the first component of a shared equipment facility within the NASA/URETI/BIMat. Scanning Kelvin Probe/Scanning Voltage Probe (SKP/SVP) has been recently added to the facility.

At Princeton, shared microscopy, fabrication, and characterization facilities include the Imaging and Analysis Center (IAC), the Princeton Center for Complex Materials (PCCM); and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM). Extensive microscopy facilities are available, including an electron microprobe (Cameca SX50); field emission transmission electron microscope (Philips CM200), transmission electron microscope (Zeiss LEO 910); two field emission scanning electron microscopes (Philips XL30, Zeiss LEO 982); atomic force microscope (Digital Instruments Nanoscope IIIa); ultra-high vacuum scanning tunneling AFM; shared computer cluster; and sample preparation facilities with ion mill, sputter coater, and ultramicrotome. Other shared instrumentation and facilities include: an electron beam evaporator; mechanical spectrometer (Rheometrics RMS 800) (temperature range of –150 to 500°C); mechanical testing system (Instron 8501) capable of tensile, compression, and fatigue tests on many types of materials; SQUID magnetometer (Quantum Design MPMS) (10-5 to 5 emu) at temperatures from 2 keV to 290 keV.

Additional computational facilities at Princeton are available within the W.M. Keck Computational Materials Science Computer Center (MSCC). The Center consists of two machines. The IBM SP, known as deeporange, currently consists of 128 processors in 32 Winterhawk SMP nodes configured in two frames. The second machine is a 64 processor SGI Origin 2000 SMP supercomputer with 32 GB of memory. This machine uses sixty-four, 64-bit MIPS R12000 Processors running with a clock speed of 300 MHz, 64 KB of instruction and data cache, 8 MB of secondary cache.