Shhhh! IBM practices nanoscience in its brand new quiet room

I am intrigued. It looks like IBM’s new nano research quiet room (which opened this Oct. 16, 2013) was announced some five years ago in 2008. Let’s start with the 2013 story, from the Oct. 18, 2013 article by Stephen Shankland for CNET,

…  IBM has just finished building new noise-free labs at its Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center. The labs, which IBM showed off Wednesday during a news media tour at its research facilities here, are designed to block out just about every kind of disturbance to IBM’s super-precise microscopes — vibrations, audio and radio noise, magnetic fields, and even turbulent air.

It doesn’t come cheap. The rooms cost about $50,000 per square foot to build, IBM researchers said in a paper published this August [2013] in the journal Nanoscale.

Duncan Graham-Rowe writing a June 27, 2008 article for MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Review described the plans for IBM’s nano quiet room and offered some responses to the idea,

This week, IBM announced plans to build the world’s largest “noise free” nanoelectronic fabrication facilities in Switzerland. By shielding equipment from external electromagnetic, thermal, and seismic noise, the new facilities should help advance research in a wide range of fields, such as spintronics, carbon-based devices, and nanophotonics, says IBM.

“What we’re trying to get to is something that is truly noise free, shielding against all these influences,” says Kaiserswerth [Matthias Kaiserswerth, director of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory]. Eventually, Kaiserswerth says, these kinds of facilities will become for nanoelectronics what clean rooms are for conventional silicon electronics.

Henry Smith, codirector of MIT’s Nanostructures Laboratory, is not so sure. “There is no firm evidence that such facilities are needed,” he says. “Active isolation of vibration is a better solution and at much lower cost.”

But Xiang Zhang, director of the Nano-Scale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley, says that it’s precisely IBM’s willingness to take risks with its new facility that will create excitement in the nanotech community. “This is a good sign,” he says.

Getting back to Shankland’s article, here’s one of the room’s features he describes,

One device the specialized environment enables is a spin-polarized scanning electron microscope (spin-SEM), which can be used to study the precise orientation of electrons so researchers can deduce properties of magnetic materials. Another is a transmission electron microscope, which can pick out features measuring less than one 10 billionth of a meter — the width of a hydrogen atom — so scientists can understand things like the types of individual chemical bonds.

It’s been a busy year for this IBM center which received a William Tell medal from the Swiss government in March 2013 (as mentioned in my March 18, 2013 posting).

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