This summer, the University of New Mexico is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Center of High Technology Materials, and pausing to think about what happened when the New Mexico legislature chose to gamble on an investment in New Mexico’s future. In 1983, lawmakers chose of gamble on setting up five Centers for Technical Excellence. As part of that initiative they appropriated $1.65 million to UNM to set up the Center for High Technology Materials at UNM.
In the beginning, the objectives of the center were to do research in electrical and optical devices, enhance interactions between UNM, the federal laboratories and industry, and promote economic development within New Mexico. CHTM is set up to function as a laboratory for students who receive degrees from various departments, but who work with faculty whose research is carried out at the center.
Steve Brueck has been the director of CHTM since 1986. Highly regarded in his field, Brueck is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the Optical Society of America.
But it is the students he works with who interest him the most. “I am most proud of the students that we have turned out. We’ve had somewhere between 350 and 400 students that have gotten advanced degrees,” he says. “And that’s a pretty significant accomplishment.” Brueck says about 200 former students still live in the Albuquerque area, working at local companies, or Sandia National Laboratories or Intel.
The Center is located in the university’s research park on the south campus and occupies two buildings. It is completely occupied now and Brueck is looking for ways to expand. Fifteen faculty members currently work with the center, along with another fifteen research faculty members. Staff and post-docs are also based there along with ten technical staff members, sixty graduate students and six undergraduate students.
Through the years CHTM has expanded its research portfolio and strengthened its support of the educational mission of the university. A well rounded research center, such as CHTM, often serves as a catalyst to bring in change to what is taught at how it is taught at a university.
Today CHTM works with interdisciplinary programs such as Optical Science and Engineering (OSE) and Nano Science and Micro Systems (NSMS). This allows students to draw from the expertise of different faculty members and provide a wide breadth to their training undergraduate students.
Research at the center is basic science, making the fundamental discoveries needed to support the development of technologies. Since the founding of the Center, researchers at CHTM have been awarded 65 patents, and research done there has spun off into 8 companies, many of which have been absorbed by larger companies.
The primary focus is still in the areas of electrical and optical research, but that has expanded and researchers now spend their days exploring the outer edge of known science in areas such as quantum dots and quantum wells. Quantum dots are small three-dimensional groups of atoms that have molecule-like optical properties. Quantum wells confine particles to two dimensions and are used in diode lasers and infrared imaging.
Another major new direction is the application of the nonoscale fabrication technologies, originally developed for the semiconductor industry, to biological science. The small scale of the structures made at CHTM provides new physics, and enables new biology. For example, proteins or enzymes in blood behave differently when they are pushed to flow through channels whose width is measured in nanometers, and researchers have opportunities to use those changes in physical behavior of the particles to improve diagnostic tools.
Optics Research
CHTM work forms the hardware layer of information technology. Companies searching for ways to make computers smaller and more powerful use the research done by CHTM and others. Brueck says computer chip makers once strongly resisted putting water into their products during the lithographic process that defines the ever small transistor structures even though research at the Center showed that was one of the few options they had to improve the performance of computer chips. Now all the newer computers use the technology.
Brueck himself has been at the forefront of this research, and is internationally recognized as one of the few researchers who understand how to stretch silicon based technology to increase the manufacturing life cycle for silicon based computer chips.
He specializes in improving lithography techniques and his work with SEMATECH has provided the cutting edge research that allows computer companies to continue building smaller and more powerful computers. Brueck’s work on double patterning is leading the way to the manufacturing technique used for the coming generation of computer chips.
Another Brueck project in collaboration with scientists at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories has led to a very high speed optical modulator that’s 10-thousand times faster than the ones currently in use in the telecommunications industry. That may have major implications for simplifying the transmission of information.
Nanofluidics
Brueck’s research in nanofluidics also has great potential. CHTM can now build channels on a scale of tens of nanometers, a size that changes the dynamics of screening for specific things in fluids and could have implications for the way DNA analysis is done.
Directed Self Assembly
Remember the children’s game with a clown’s face that you tilted to roll small metal spheres into the eyes and mouth? Brueck and his team can do that with millions and billions of 50 nanometer balls that he can maneuver into channels and stack the balls on top of each other into porous walls. The walls could then filter bits of material. This technique is so new they’ve just begun to explore possible ways it can be used.
Infrared Detectors
The military has always been interested in using infrared detectors, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research has just given CHTM about a million dollars for a new molecular beam epitaxy machine. Researchers at CHTM use it to precisely grow crystals atom by atom to prove the technology for sensitive detectors.
Current research at CHTM by Electrical and Computing Engineering Professors Sanjay Krishna and Majeed Hayat allows a camera to photograph thermal photons emitted from objects. The military uses the technology to identify people and objects in the dark. Civilian use includes machines that can detect heat coming from homes for energy audits.
Nanowires
Electrical and Computing Engineering Professor Steve Hersee is growing nanowires, by setting up masks and allowing the wires to grow through them. Hersee is excited about that because the technique eliminates many defects that are common in nanowires. The nanowires may eventually be used to make efficiency improvements in LED lighting.
Microscopy
Hersee is also working on a project with the Wadsworth institute in New York State. He is developing a more controllable light source for microscopes that may allow automation in reading routine health test results, freeing technicians to concentrate on unusual results that need more attention. The idea is to make diagnosis quicker and more consistent for patients.
In another project, Brueck is extending some of the ideas developed for lithography to microscopy and has demonstrated a resolution beyond the classical diffraction limit.
Most research now underway at CHTM involves more than one discipline. Brueck says, “It comes out of being an active research group with different people contributing different ideas, which is what science is all about. That’s what makes the center so exciting is that you have this multiplicity of different inputs.”
Media contact: Karen Wentworth (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu
Posted by kwentworth at July 22, 2009 02:51 PM