Fundacion Telegenio A.C. - U of A's nanotech lab takes undergrads to new level of tiny

U of A's nanotech lab takes undergrads to new level of tiny

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Escrito por Antonio Rada García

viernes, 02 de abril de 2010

Students

In a small, windowless room at the University of Alberta, a dozen undergraduate students sit in the middle of $2-million worth of new equipment sensitive enough to measure an atom, the smallest particle of matter.

It's the first place in Canada where students not yet finished their first degree can start running real experiments on the nano scale, lab co-ordinator Ben Bathgate said.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California's Stanford University have undergraduate labs that come close, "but they don't have the range of equipment," he said.

It's fragile, state-of-the-art, and so new that one of the 18 machines still has parts in bubble wrap.

Students started working in the lab in January. Bathgate watches them closely. "In a lot of the other labs, we encourage students to experiment, play with the equipment.

"There's none of that here." Last Thursday, engineering students

crowded around a profilometer in the far corner of the room.

They measured the warp in a thin film of chromium 200 nanometres thick, stuck to a wafer of silicon. Chelsea McLeod, 22, slid the wafer in and shut the door, and a tiny probe, too thin to see, dropped down to run across the surface. The results showed up minutes later on a nearby computer screen.

The warp was caused by heating and cooling the wafer since the layers of chromium and silicon expand and contract at different rates.

The students are trying to measure the stress created between the layers. It's practical, said McLeod's classmate, Darcy Stevens, 21.

"This is just one property of a film-coated wafer," he said. "But computer chips are actually dozens or hundreds of layers of metals: aluminum, copper, gold, platinum."

They can easily heat to 60 or 70 C because of the electrical current running through them in your computer, he said. "It's important to know what will happen when you do this.

"Nobody knows what we're talking about, but this stuff is really interesting."

Nanotechnology has become better know in Edmonton as the industry grows. Across the river from the university campus, NAIT is planning to start Canada's first nanotechnology diploma to train technologists for the industry. They accept their first students this September.

Nano means the work is at a small scale, but that's important because the properties of materials change drastically when you deal with really tiny pieces, professor Ken Cadien said.

For their first lab, the students worked with metal films that were up to 100,000 times smaller than the copper wires used in a house. In a copper wire, most of the electricity flows through the centre, and the properties of the surface have little effect on how easily the current flows. But when a wire gets as thin as 100 nanometres, there is little material left in the centre. The wire is basically all surface, and if the wire is thin enough, some of the electrons can even start to flow backward. Suddenly that copper wire might as well have been made of rubber.

Working with all these new properties, researchers develop new tools for use in everything from sunglasses to electronics to medical bandages.

The funding for the new lab came from the provincial government. The equipment is actually worth more than $2 million, Bathgate said. Many companies lowered prices when they found out the machines were for undergraduates because it gives the companies exposure.

These students are just one semester away from graduating, heading to master's research or positions in the growing number of local nanotechnology manufacturing companies in the region. They could be buying company equipment soon.

Instructors are designing projects for the students as they go, basically putting the textbook together on the fly.

Just two classes are using the lab this semester, but by the time it's running at full capacity, students from four departments will be involved -- bioengineering, chemical, materials and electrical engineering.

Antonio Vega is a visiting Mexican student who came to the University of Alberta for one semester just for the equipment here.

"In Mexico, we don't know the basics of this," he said.

"Just being able to use the equipment is really interesting," Chelsea McLeod said, adding "you get to see what's actually happening."

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