The Center for Nanoscience Innovation for Defense (CNID) has been created to facilitate the rapid transition of research innovation in the nanosciences into applications for the defense sector. U.S. government allocations of $13.5 million are being shared equally by three University of California institutions: UCSB (Santa Barbara), UCLA and UCR (Riverside), and a second increment is anticipated that will ultimately bring total funding to more than $20 million over three years.

CNID is sponsored by two federal agencies: the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and Defense MicroElectronics Activity.

UCSB physics and electrical and computer engineering professor David Awschalom spearheaded efforts to establish the new center, whose participants, in addition to the three universities, include the National Labs (particularly Los Alamos) and 10 industrial partners (Boeing, DuPont, Hewlett-Packard, Hughes Research Laboratories, Motorola, NanoSys, Northrop Grumman, Rockwell Scientific, Raytheon and TRW).

The CNID effort at UCLA is being led by Eli Yablonovitch, professor of electrical engineering. Yablonovitch is known as the inventor of the photonic crystal concept, which has many applications in science and engineering, particularly in nanophotonics, one of a number of broad research areas being targeted by CNID.

UCSB and UCLA joined together two years ago to form the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). Under the terms of that initiative fostered by Gov. Gray Davis, the state of California is matching every $2 of non-state support with $1 in state funding up to $100 million. Since the CNID monies qualify for the state match, CNSI at Santa Barbara and Los Angeles benefits 1.5 times the federal allocation.

The state money has been used principally to build two California NanoSystems Institute research facilities, one at Santa Barbara and one at Los Angeles. The CNID funds are being used to equip the facilities with state-of-the-art, high-tech instrumentation, and for graduate fellowships that will enable the University of California campuses to compete for and to attract the best graduate students worldwide to advance nanoscience and nanotechnology
research both in universities and also in industrial laboratories. Those students are intended not only to be the nanoscience university researchers of the future, but also the nanotechnology talent for high-tech American businesses.

According to Awschalom, the motivation for CNID arose from discussions in federal research agencies for science and defense who recognized a problem emerging with the diminution of basic research in the nation’s major industrial laboratories, such as Bell Labs and IBM. The latter, for instance, is planning to sell its Data Storage Division — once the focus for much basic science and technology research — to Hitachi.

“Innovation in American industry has been intimately connected to discoveries in basic science,� Awschalom said. “With the disappearance of basic science research in industrial laboratories, the U.S. government is concerned about the source of future innovation. So it was decided as an experiment to back a group of universities where faculty were experienced both in working with industry and also doing fundamental science in order to form a network with companies to keep them informed of the latest developments in science and technology.

It’s all about enabling America’s businesses — contractors for defense technology — to keep abreast of current information.�

“Keeping current is not only a matter of information, but also of talent,� Awschalom said. “The companies want to attract the very best science and technology students and hire them. CNID will offer unique opportunities for graduate student researchers to gain industrial research experience through collaborative projects and summer internships. In particular, we will join with the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and North Dakota State University in promoting exchange programs in nanotechnology.�

“CNID will act as a conduit, through which industrial partners can recruit highly trained students in the areas of nanoscale science and engineering, and will allow students to obtain contact with ‘real world’ research and development in the private sector,� he said.

“This experiment extends to developing people who are doing science and technology of interest to many companies. Broadly speaking, the experiment focuses on knowledge transfer in the form of information and human expertise to U.S. companies — knowledge particularly relevant to national defense,� Awschalom said.

Stu Wolf, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency program manager, points out his desire “that this experiment provide a major focus for research collaborations well beyond the initial partners. The cost of establishing a first-rate research infrastructure is beyond the reach of many institutions that have excellent researchers.�

“It is essential that centers of excellence be established that provide scientists around the country with both world-class facilities and collaborators. I hope this new institution provides a model for the development of other centers so that the U.S. can maintain its scientific and technological leadership far into the foreseeable future,� Wolf said.

CNID research focus at UCLA

The CNID research program aims at understanding and thereby controlling nanometer-scale systems for advanced technology. The prefix “nano� means “one-billionth,� so a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. The DNA molecule is two nanometers wide — roughly 1,000 times smaller than a blood cell or 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

At UCLA, CNID research will focus on four areas: quantum telecommunication nano-devices, development of a single-electron-spin microscope, photonic crystal nano-optical structures and circuits, and molecular-level electronic and mechanical devices.

Quantum telecommunication nano-devices:

Yablonovitch is the principal investigator of a project to demonstrate a spin-coherent photon transmitter/receiver system that would allow for the long-distance transmission of secure information.

As the Department of Defense becomes more involved in protecting our vital information, an opportunity has emerged for secure communication and secure networking by quantum communication protocols. These would guarantee that information transmission is protected from eavesdropping, with that assurance based on physical laws.

Such secure telecommunications systems have begun to emerge recently in the form of quantum cryptography. But in its current form, quantum cryptography can transmit only short distances — a few tens of kilometers — before the optical photons are absorbed or otherwise lost. Thus, long-distance transmission requires repeaters to repeatedly amplify and regenerate the signals along the route. The problem is that no repeater exists for long-distance quantum information transmission. The creation of a quantum repeater is a goal of this project.

To fulfill this opportunity to transmit quantum information over long distances, we will need to safely store quantum information for correspondingly long propagation times. A critical role will be played by new opto-electronic devices that transmit and detect single photons, and that can store quantum information in a single-electron spin. The devices are necessarily very small, since they deal in individual photons and in individual electron spins.

Development of a single-electron spin microscope

Another project that will benefit from the infrastructure investments to be made under CNID at UCLA is the development and construction of a single-electron spin microscope. In the biology of proteins and in genetic engineering, there is a need for a microscope that can image a single molecule.

Professor Karoly Holczer of the UCLA physics department is leading an effort to create a new type of microscope that holds the promise to revolutionize nanometer-scale science and has the potential to transform numerous scientific disciplines. In effect this is a microscope that will make an MRI image not of the human body, but of a single molecule. It will be able to image the folding structure of proteins and of other significant molecules.

At the same time, this will be a major accomplishment in experimental physics since it is challenging to detect a single electron, much less its miniscule spin magnetic moment. The prospect of obtaining analytical (i.e. magnetic resonance) information in the form of atomic-scale resolution scanning probe microscopy is quite attractive. Most significantly, sensing minute structural changes at the individual protein level holds the key for both drug screening and creating biomolecular sensors and devices.

Hundreds of ingenious experiments, individually designed to probe selected molecules, point to an urgent need for a general, enabling tool in this area. Combining the electron spin microscope with site-directed spin labeling — a genetic engineering technique of attaching a paramagnetic molecule to any specific amino acid — could well be this enabling tool.

It is expected that the single-electron spin microscope will play its role in revolutionizing our ability to understand and control the nano-world, with implications for both medical research and for national defense.

Photonic crystal nano-optical structures and circuits

A crossroads has arrived in materials-processing technology. Integrated circuits are now being printed at a critical dimension smaller than an optical wavelength. That means that it will now be possible to mass-produce optical components that are made at the size scale of one optical wavelength or less. Such nanophotonic integrated circuits are in the direct evolutionary path of conventional micro-electronic technology.

Professor Bahram Jalali of the UCLA Department of Electrical Engineering is leading an effort to bring the benefits of silicon-integrated circuit technology into the world of optical communications chips. Among the class of optical components that operate at the unit wavelength scale, photonic crystal components may be the most flexible and adaptable.

Photonic crystals are multidimensionally periodic dielectric structures for electromagnetic waves that are built by analogy with the band structure of semiconductor crystals for electron waves. The concepts of band structure carry over to photons, and the creation of a photonic bandgap is a starting-point for the creation of many types of optical devices and systems. Indeed, photonic crystals are usually made of semiconductors, and they can exhibit both a photonic bandgap and an electronic bandgap in the same substance. They hold the promise of bringing the silicon semiconductor revolution fully into the world of photonics.

Intentionally created point defects in a photonic crystal act as very tiny electromagnetic cavities. Indeed, such a cavity is the tiniest electromagnetic cavity ever made, and has been pumped to the lasing threshold, making the tiniest laser ever. Such optical nanostructures can be the basis of a nanoscopic photonic integrated circuit technology that is rooted in the economics, miniaturization and process technology of conventional silicon-integrated circuits.

It is possible to envisage a complete nanophotonic technology based on the emerging standards for silicon-on-insulator technology, standards that are rooted in the requirements of pure electronics rather than optics. This would be nanophotonic integration compatible with, and manufactured in standard Si-foundries alongside high-speed transistors. This will open the door to CMOS chips that process information at full multi-wavelength bandwidths, up to 40 Tera-Hertz and above.

Molecular level electronic and mechanical devices

A major advantage of molecular electronics circuitry is that it can potentially scale to molecular dimensions, and, in fact, small memory circuits at a density of greater than 1011 memory elements per cm2 have been fabricated. Leading this effort at UCLA is professor Fraser Stoddart of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

There are a number of advantages to molecular electronics circuitry that are related to a combination of easy addressability of the memory elements coupled with low-temperature, gentle device fabrication methods. The implication is that it may be possible to fabricate simple crosspoint random access memory circuits on plastic substrates. Working crosspoint molecular electronics-based memory circuit in the form of random access memory (RAM) elements
have been fabricated using standard optical lithography techniques, but with all steps carried out under ambient conditions.

The UCLA team will work toward developing fabrication techniques that will enable such memory circuits on plastic, glass and other substrates that are typically unavailable for more traditional RAM-type circuits.

Ultra-high frequency mechanical resonators are needed for wireless communications, and may be achieved by reducing the dimensions of micro-mechanical resonators to true nanoscopic dimensions, and by increasing the forces between the various mechanical components to increase mechanical stiffness. Since the mechanical motion in a molecular mechanical system arises from a molecular process, it can be triggered using chemical, electrical, or optical stimuli — thereby generating a host of mechanical materials that can be driven in a variety of ways. They can act as chemical and biosensor arrays, as well as for fabricating ultra-small scale molecular electronics circuits.

These examples of research are representative of the four target CNID areas at UCLA, but the areas themselves include many more research projects. What the examples do show especially taken in conjunction with the much larger research agenda at the California NanoSystems Institute is the pace and scope of discovery and innovation in nanoscience and nanoengineering. CNID exists as an experiment to bring that knowledge and human expertise to America’s industries for the purpose of defense.

(Note to Editors: Call Awschalom at 805-893-2121 or e-mail awsch@physics.ucsb.edu. For information about CNID efforts at UCLA, call Eli Yablonovitch at 310-206-2240 or e-mail eliy@ee.ucla.edu; and at Riverside, call Robert C. Haddon at 909-787-2044 or e-mail robert.haddon@ucr.edu. To download a graphic depicting nanoscale in comparison to micro- and millimeter scales and an image of UCSB’s ultrafast measurement laboratory, go to the press release at www.engineering.ucsb.edu/ and follow the links to the high-resolution version; for help downloading, contact kramer@engineering.ucsb.edu.)