Nanotechnology Research Laboratories

A dedicated laboratory offers nanotechnology services.

The network brings together well established research groups and industrial concerns in complementary fields of precision engineering and nanometrology in the UK.

The SOMS Centre is an interdisciplinary research centre where chemists, physicists, biologists and engineers seek to understand the science of molecular self-assembly and self-organisation, to engineer new functional exploitable materials and devices.

This interdisciplinary group is researching the formation, structure, dynamics and interactions of matter at the molecular and nanoscale.

Accelerating materials discovery through collocation of industry and academia, and the use of robotics and high-performing computing.

The programme starts in late September each year and is divided into three approximately equal periods. The first and second periods consist of lectures, laboratory classes, seminars and similar material. In the third period, students undertake an individually supervised project on a topic relevant to their special interests.

The current research themes of the SSRC cut across the disciplines of chemistry, physics, biology and materials science, and combine the efforts of both experimentalists and theoreticians. The overarching ambition of this work is to achieve nanoscale control, design and assembly of function.

Porous materials are omnipresent in nature: microporous materials, such as zeolite minerals, with pores of angstrom, molecular dimensions; mesoprous materials, such as cell membranes, with nanometre-sized pores; macroporous materials, such as diatom skeletons, with micron-sized pores. Synthetic analogues of such materials are prepared and studied here and find many industrial uses in for instance catalysis, water treatment, environmental clean-up, molecular separation and opto-electronics.

The goal of the centre is to create an easy-to-access-and-use, multidisciplinary workshop with extensive facilities, that allows researchers to fabricate, visualise and characterise structures and devices containing individual elements from a few microns down to 10 nm in size.

The group's research activities cover a range of topics concerned with the fundamental materials and physics issues surrounding advanced semiconductor devices, novel high speed electronic and optoelectronic devices, and advanced sensors and systems.