Other Departmental and Interdisciplinary Facilities
A number of complementary facilities in Physics Department and Boston University enable us to develop cutting-edge technologies for the fabrication, characterization and measurement of nanoscale structures.
Photonics Center Optical Processing Facility (OPF)
The Photonics Center has built and staffed a new state-of-the-art optioelectronics processing facility (OPF) with uv-photolithography capability, e-beam and thermal evaporators, rapid thermal annealer, surface profilometery, reactive-ion etcher, plasma enhanced etch and chemical vapor deposition, optical characterization, and many other capabilities all in a large clean-room in the Center. The OPF is used to fabricate the nanostructures, free-standing structures, waveguides, and platforms.
Physics Department: Scientific Instrument Facility (SIF)
The Scientific Instrument Facility (SIF) is located in the basement of the Physics Research Building and is funded through the Physics Department. The SIF is a superbly equipped machine shop with a shop director, a project director, a staff of eight machinists, a welder, and an assembly director. The shop has over 10,000 square feet of climate-controlled workspace with truck access, crane coverage, and a high bay area. It is a modern, fully-equipped shop with both manual and computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines: five CNC knee mills, two manual knee mills, four high-precision tool room lathes, two CNC lathes, a CNC horizontal boring mill, three CNC vertical machining centers, three large manual lathes, and two surface grinders. The shop also has all the machinery needed for stock preparation, including a large shear, an automatic cutoff saw, and a large bending brake. In addition, the shop has complete welding and leak-checking capabilities. The SIF has built all the support structures for our dilution fridge and He3 fridge. This includes extensive small-parts work in titanium, ceramic and phenolics for low-temperature operation.
SIF Webpage: http://physics.bu.edu/SIF/
Physics Department: Electronics Design Facility
The Electronics Design Facility (EDF), located in the Physics Research Building, has a full-time staff of four engineers and several student technicians and is actively seeking an additional senior engineer. The EDF offers advanced electronics design, prototyping, and testing capability in support of our research program. Custom integrated circuit (IC) and printed circuit board (PCB) design is done in-house on state-of-the-art CAD tools, including a system provided by Mentor Graphics under its Higher Education Program. The EDF has been involved in several projects on the design of ultra-fast feedback circuits for measurement of nanomechanical structures at high megahertz range frequencies. These circuits and control electronics are used in a number of experiments in our laboratory for ultra-sensitive measurements of small signals.
EDF Webpage: http://ohm.bu.edu/edf.html
Boston University: Photonics Center
In 1997, the University completed the nine-story, 235,000 square-foot Photonics Building to house its ambitious initiative in combining university research and corporate endeavor. The million facility includes a full complement of state-of-the-art laboratories as well as meeting rooms, lecture halls, and an entire floor devoted to incubator space for start-up companies that complements its existing incubator at 1106 Commonwealth Avenue. Faculty affiliated with the Center have in-depth expertise in all aspects of photonics technology, including the core areas of optoelectronics, photonic materials, data storage, imaging systems, medical applications, and sensors.
Resources available to industry partners, government, faculty, and students through the Photonics Center support development and testing of ideas and products. These resources include several research and development laboratories: Scanning Infrared Near- Field Microscopy Laboratory, Optoelectronic Device Characterization Laboratory, Femtosecond Laser Facility, Photochemical Processes Laboratory, Photonic Systems Engineering Laboratory, Liquid Crystal Display Laboratory, Quantum Optics Laboratory, Precision Optics Laboratory, Optoelectronic Materials Laboratory, Precison Measurement Laboratory, Optoelectronic Processing Facility, Laser Measurement and Fiber Optic Sensors Laboratory, Magnetic and Optical Devices Laboratory, Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy Laboratory, and the Picosecond Spectroscopy Laboratory.
Photonics Center Webpage: http://www.bu.edu/photonics/
Computational Facilities at the Center for Computational Science
An extensive network of computational facilities supports the research activities of the Department. For computationally intensive applications, students and faculty have access to supercomputing resources supported through the Center for Computational Science and the Office of Information Technology. These currently include an IBM RS/6000 SP with 64 processors, peak capacity 96 Gflops and a 192-processor SGI-Cray Origin 2000 supercomputer with a peak performance of 75 Gflops.
Weblink to Center for Computational Science: http://ccs.bu.edu/