Small steps into giant leaps!

The Interdisciplinary Centre for Nanoscience will make devices or structures that are only a few nanometres in size (much smaller than the diameter of a single human hair), and then measure how they work.

The Centre is part of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) in Nanotechnology and will draw together experts from the University of Cambridge, University College London and the University of Bristol.

The funding deal for the building is part of a £18 million package awarded by three of the Government’s Science Research Councils for nanotechnology IRCs, at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. These are the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Medical Research Council. The Wolfson Foundation is also part funding the Cambridge Centre.

Professor Mark Welland, Head of the Nanoscale Science Laboratory in the Department of Engineering, will be the Cambridge IRC director.
"This unique partnership of funding agencies underlines the strategic importance of nanotechnology and its multi-disciplinary outlook.

"The Cambridge IRC will bring together nanofabrication from the Department of Engineering and the Department of Physics, and will provide a focus for the activities of Chemistry, Materials Science and Metallurgy, and life sciences departments," he said.

Professor Richard Friend, of the University’s Department of Physics, added:
"Our aim is to set up an international research centre which will being together scientists from a range of fields to carry out top quality nanotechnology research and to provide a platform from which that research can be commercially exploited."

Nanotechnology involves the manipulation and manufacture of objects on an atomic scale. Enormous advances have been made in this science in the last 20 years and already the tools needed to make and measure infinitesimally small objects have become commonplace.