Research Mission
The NCN's approach to research flows from a commitment to connect experiment, theory, and computation in a new way. Our focus is applied, but long term. Each project has clear objectives, a three-year duration, and a mission to advance the field. We choose projects that are ready for a coordinated, multi-disciplinary attack. Sufficient science must have been done so that a promise of significant, new technologies has been identified. A team of experts with complementary skills and interests addresses outstanding scientific questions as well as important technological issues. The team begins with atomistic treatments of materials and connects them to mesoscopic descriptions of devices, and finally to the macroscopic description of integrated nanosystems. In the process of addressing these problems, the teams wrestle with the challenges of connecting length and time scales and crossing disciplinary boundaries. Each project also includes significant computational challenges, and an applied mathematician or computer scientist to address those challenges.
We aim to advance the field and, at the same time, develop the understanding, approaches, and simulation tools that will allow engineers to design new nanoelectronic and NEMS technologies. The fields that the NCN addresses — Nanoelectronics, Nanoelectromechanical Systems, and Nano-bioelectronics — are broad but with sufficient focus so that they can benefit from synergies. Ultimately we see these three themes merging with the goal of connecting dry electronic and mechanical nanosystems to wet biological nanosystems.
Fields of Focus
Nanoelectronics
The vision of the NCN's nanoelectronics research is to understand conduction at the molecular scale and to develop the approaches and tools to simulate small electronic devices very generally. NCN researchers are developing simulation tools that range from toy models that provide insight, to empirical models that may become CAD tools of the future, to ab initio simulations that provide insight into critical problems.
The nanoelectronics teams is currently addressing three problems: i) carbon nanotube electronics ii) molecules on silicon (in collaboration with the NASA Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing) iii) silicon nanoelectronics (in collaboration with the MARCO Focus Center for Materials, Structures, and nano-Devices.
Nanoelectronics team
- Supriyo Datta, Purdue University
- Mark Lundstrom, Purdue University
- Mark Ratner, Northwestern University
- Kaushik Roy, Purdue University
Nanoelectromechanical Systems
The development of a suite of computational prototyping tools and approaches for NEMS is the first project in the NEMS theme. NEMS research requires a multidisciplinary approach because of the presence of several physical domains - e.g. mechanics, electrostatics, fluidics, biology, chemistry, and of several forces (Coulomb, van der Waals, bonding). Atomistic, device, circuit, and system issues are being explored using a suite of computational design tools based on fine-grained and coarse-grained multiscale approaches, continuum approaches, and reduced-order and circuit-level approaches. The initial focus is on carbon nanotube and silicon structures where the experimental knowledge base is rapidly expanding, but the software resulting from this approach will impact a variety of other structural and material nanoscale problems.
NEMS Team
- Narayan Aluru, UIUC
- Jason Clark, Purdue
- Jayathi Murthy, Purdue
- Alejandro Strachan, Purdue
Nano-bio
Researchers in the nano-bio project are adapting well-developed methods for carrier transport in semiconductors to new problems in biology. Transport in artificial and natural ion channels is the first problem being addressed. The objective is to understand how natural biological channels function and how artificial structures that mimic biological systems at the nanoscale might be realized. Applications such as DNA sequencing via artificial nanopores are being explored. Simulation capabilities for specific problems like this are first being developed, and later, they will be extended for wet/dry systems more generally.
Nano-bio team
- Umberto Ravaioli, UIUC
- George Schatz, Northwestern
Special Projects
The NCN also supports smaller efforts with a seed project flavor. Research on grid computing middleware connects the NCN to a larger effort that is working to develop the NCN's next-generation network-computing computing environment. This work is being done at the University of Florida by Professors José A.B. Fortes and Renato Figueiredo.
Work on visualization aims to bring the latest approaches of visualization experts to current problems in nanotechnology and to apply it to both research and education. This work is being done at Purdue by Professor David Ebert.
Tools for computational catalysis are being developed by Professor Kendall Thomson at Purdue University.