Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials is attracting researchers from around the world who like to think small…very small.

A short train ride from downtown New York City can take a researcher to a state-of-the-art facility to examine nanomaterials from beginning to end. Located in the heart of Long Island, the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Brookhaven) is a user-focused facility, one of five Nanoscale Science Research Centers (NSRCs) in the United States, which provide world-leading expertise and infrastructure for nanotechnology researchers from across the nation and around the globe.

“We are at the interface between basic and applied research,” said Emilio Mendez, director of CFN. A researcher can apply to use the centers’ facilities for federally funded lab time as long as the results end up in the public domain. Companies that want to conduct proprietary research must pay for access.

“Anyone with a good idea is welcome to submit a proposal, and we welcome users from industry as well as from academia, government labs and other institutions,” said Altaf Carim, NSRCs program manager. “The NSRCs do fundamental research, focusing not on manufacturing per se. Each center has different strengths; each can draw heavily on the strengths of the lab they are located in.”

At Brookhaven, CFN researchers conduct their own internal research projects, and spend half their research time in assisting outside users. As with its sister centers across the country, CFN scientists are not just lab technicians there to help outside users’ research. They share their expertise with the variety of users who visit the facilities. Conducting experiments at any NSRC is both “a learning experience and a working experience,” said Mendez.

“I collaborate as much as I can” with Brookhaven’s CFN researchers, said Richard Osgood, a Columbia University professor. He regularly sends his students by train to conduct experiments at CFN. They may stay for a day or more to complete projects with the assistance and tutelage of CFN researchers at Brookhaven.

Osgood’s group uses electron beams generated in the CFN clean rooms to “write” on the surface of silicon-based nanomaterials. The beams erase photoresist on silicon wafers, which are then exposed to solvent that etches tiny tracks to serve as nanowire templates. The final products—nanometerthin, several centimeter–long nanowires—conduct compressed light to carry information. The team’s fundamental nonlinear optics research could eventually lead to advanced ideas for solar cells, one of CFN’s focus areas.

Columbia University may have its own clean room, but it’s not big enough to create the 3- to 4-centimeter–long wires Osgood needs. CFN has high-quality tools that can make centimeter-long segments. These sections still require “stitching” with a 100-keV electron-beam tool, housed at nearby Alcatel-Lucent, to join them together. That joining process creates fault lines in the final material that interfere with the highintensity light beams the team uses. But CFN is about to buy its own lithography tool that will enable Osgood and his students to create seamless wires in the near future, all in one place.

Each of the five centers has that same “high density” of specialized equipment, Mendez said, which allows researchers to delve into all aspects of nanomaterials, from synthesis to processing to analysis and data crunching. “We have no single piece of equipment that is unique,” Mendez explained. “The difference is that the equipment comes with institutional knowledge. For example, CFN is one of the world’s leaders in working on analytical transmission electron microscopes,” Mendez said.

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) labs have pursued nanomaterials research for a decade or more, but the focused user facilities for nanoscience are relatively young. CFN, the newest of DOE’s nanocenters, opened its doors in March, 2008. The oldest, the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was fully operational by the end of 2006. Other centers include those located at Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne) in DuPage County, Illinois, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) in Berkeley, California, as well as the jointly-operated Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, with components at Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Each DOE nanocenter has its own specialties and technical expertise, and leverages other nearby assets. Such is the case at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials, which makes use of the unique capabilities of the hard X-rays from the Advanced Photon Source to characterize extremely small structures.

It’s too soon to say exactly how much these federal user facilities have contributed to research and to the market for nanomaterials, said Michael Holman, a research director at Lux Research. Facilities like those of the NSRCs remain unaffordable for most universities, colleges or small businesses, but accessible through these centers. Holman notes that even larger companies such as IBM are willing to purchase time in the centers’ labs, instead of buying and maintaining on their own campuses expensive equipment that might be rarely used.

The benefits will come, though it will take several years to see the impact of the partnerships forged at the five centers, Holman said. One challenge that DOE faces at these nanoscience user centers is how to take basic research and incorporate it into applications. Private companies seemed initially worried about divulging their proprietary work in a publicly funded space, Holman said. They voiced concerns over compromising their legal patents and possibly alerting competitors to their research directions. But DOE has adapted to a dual model, allowing companies to pay to access the facilities without “showing their hands” to the market. Products that contain nanomaterials, such as protective paint coatings or active pharmaceuticals, will grow to a market value of $3.1 trillion by 2015, according to Lux Research. Holman added that DOE user centers enable small startups to stay in the game, while also encouraging basic research that could lead to new discoveries.

One current example of fundamental research with a potential payoff is CFN’s inquiry into plastic materials for photovoltaics (PV). CFN researchers are trying to figure out what limits plastic PV’s efficiency. Though much cheaper than silicon PV, polymer PV is only 5 percent efficient at converting sunlight to energy, compared to silicon’s 15 to 20 percent efficiency, Mendez said. At Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, the center’s researchers build new nanomolecules as part of basic research. The center shares its new molecules with outside users for further research and, perhaps, for product development.

The lure of specialized infrastructure and knowledge housed at the sister centers is “worth going cross-country” to use, said Osgood, from the computing expertise at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry to experience with ferroelectric nanomaterials at ORNL’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences.

Still, Osgood emphasizes, “Having the access to advanced fabrication tools in the New York metropolitan area is extremely important” to fostering materials research in the region, whether academic or industrial. Each center serves its own region well and helps researchers “get into nano in a big way.”