Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT): Science-Base for Future Integrated Systems

Abstract

The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), first announced in 2000 has grown into a major U. S. investment involving twenty federal agencies. As a lead federal agency, the Department of Energy (DOE) is developing a network of Nanoscale Science and Research Centers (NSRC). NSRCs will be highly collaborative national user facilities associated with DOE National Laboratories where university, laboratory and industrial researchers can work together to advance nanoscience and technology. The Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), which is operated jointly by Sandia National Laboratories and Alamos National Laboratory, has a unique technical vision focused on integrating scientific disciplines and expertise across multiple length scales going all the way from the nano world to the world around us. It is often said that nanotechnology has the potential to change almost everything we do. However, this prophecy will only come to pass when we learn to couple nanoscale functions into the macroscale world. Obviously coupling the nano-and micro-length scales is an important piece of this challenge and one can site many examples where the performance of existing microdevices has been improved by adding nanotechnology. Examples include low friction coatings for MEMS and compact light sources for liChemLab spectrometers. While this approach has produced significant benefit, we believe that the true potential will be realized only when device architectures are designed “from the nanoscale up”, allowing nanoscale function to drive microscale performance.