For more than 25 years, CNF’s culture of openness has offered an environment where researchers from across the campus and around the world excel.

There's good reason for thinking small. Without microfabrication, we wouldn’t have digital watches, cellular phones, CD players, fax machines, and ink-jet printers. But these days, nanotechnology isn’t just about making smaller computer chips. It’s about re-imagining technology on the molecular level, with new applications leading beyond microelectronics, into the worlds of medicine, energy, and agriculture.

It’s a nano world, and the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF) is at the center, providing tools for visiting scientists to create structures as small as 20 billionths of a meter. With a staff of under two dozen employees and equipment worth over $130 million, CNF has established a supportive, state-of-the-art environment for researchers from across the country and around the globe.

A month before the lab’s anniversary celebration, with construction finishing up outside the conference room windows, Sandip Tiwari has gathered his staff for a talk. There’s Tiwari, the Lester B. Knight Director of CNF, sitting next to Lynn Rathbun, the lab’s senior research associate. Sitting opposite them are Michael Skvarla, user program manager, and Melanie-Claire Mallison, corporate and public relations associate.

“CNF is a place where people can pursue their best research without any barriers,” says Tiwari. “By gathering a tremendous number of resources and fostering a unique sense of openness, we have created an environment where anyone can excel.”

It’s Ezra Cornell’s original vision, retooled for the 21st century. Some of CNF’s users are academics, some are researchers for industry, and some are completely independent. Some stay for years at a time, some for a week, and some never come at all, working off-site with CNF staff support.

At CNF, there’s no particular orientation that scientists need to follow, no obligation to come up with the Next Big Thing, and no external pressure to see an experiment produce results. Instead, there’s limitless opportunity for people from a wide variety of backgrounds to pursue their vision at what Skvarla calls “a full service site.”

“From the beginning, CNF has established a culture of openness and a willingness to work with anyone who comes here,” says Skvarla, who’s been at the facility for twenty years. “We’re totally neutral — we’re not beholden to any research groups, and we don’t owe our financing to any academic department. Our only goal is to help researchers, and that’s what distinguishes this environment from just about every other.”

“There are lots of places that can provide equipment,” says Rathbun, who’s worked at the facility since the day it opened. “But at CNF, we don’t just provide the equipment. We also provide the staff expertise to support our users in pursuing their work. What’s unique is the openness to apply our technology to new problems and new areas. We offer the capability for experts in other fields to test their ideas for new microstructure applications. There are few other places in the country that can say that, and CNF is really the leader.”

Celebrating its 25th anniversary with a new home in Duffield Hall, CNF began with a 1977 grant from the National Science Foundation. After edging out the competition from other, bigger universities — probably because of the broadness of its vision, articulated by Cornell electrical engineering professor Joseph M. Ballantyne, the facility’s first director — the lab officially began as the National Research and Resource Facility for Submicron Structures (NRRFSS), opening its doors on the fourth floor of Phillips Hall the next year.

Four years later, after outgrowing its space, the facility moved next door to the newly constructed Knight Laboratory, and in 1987, reshaped its mission to become the National Nanofabrication Facility (NNF). When the lab began ten years earlier, fabrication at the micrometer was still in the realm of research; by the time NRRFSS became the NNF, submicrometer fabrication had become routine. Engineers’ dreams of working at the micron scale (one millionth of a meter) had morphed into the everyday reality of fabricating at the nanoscale (one billionth of a meter), and the lab’s emphasis shifted towards more sophisticated applications of these new structures.

During its decade of operation, the NRRFSS hosted over three hundred projects from universities, industry, and federal laboratories throughout the country. Under the direction of electrical engineering professor Edward Wolf, the NRRFSS laid the foundations for university-based research centers, interdisciplinary research programs, and university-industry centers, serving as the template for collaborative, interdisciplinary research in nanotechnology.

“Joe Ballantyne was the most critical person in bringing CNF to life,” says Tiwari, who in 1999 succeeded Ballantyne who was serving a second stint as director of the facility. (He was the acting director in 1977.) “He had the original vision of bringing together faculty from across campus to work on projects at the boundaries of their disciplines. Ed Wolf’s major contribution was to establish this culture of openness that has fostered all this great research ever since.”

“The culture here is really very open, very accepting,” says Mallison, who joined the staff in 1996. “We cover a variety of different disciplines, and it makes for a much more open-minded atmosphere. Chemical engineers rub shoulders with biologists, and biologists rub shoulders with MEMS [microelectromechanical systems] people, and there are always researchers in this conference room, bouncing ideas off one another.”

At the beginning, user support was only part of the lab’s primary mission, which focused much of its efforts on Cornell faculty and students working on long-term, cross-disciplinary collaborations. But by the time it grew into the NNF, working as part of a network of nanofabrication facilities, it was attracting scientists from far beyond campus, and reorienting itself as a resource facility for the support of new hands-on research.

“CNF started out as an experiment,” says Mallison “That was a brand new idea — having a lab that was open to any user who had the time and inclination to use it — and a lot of people thought it couldn’t possibly work. But over the years, CNF has grown more confident, more sure of itself. It’s stopped being an experiment and become the model of how a facility like this should be run.”

Since then, CNF has become one of the largest and most active nanoscale facilities in the world, expanding its staff and providing an increasingly broad range of resources for work in biology, chemistry, electronics, and optics. Its state-of-the-art equipment includes everything necessary for fabricating structures as small as 20nm — about 5,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. The breadth of the lab’s tools are unequaled in academia, with instruments for electron beam lithography, photolithography, etching, thin film deposition, and a wide variety of testing, measurement, and support equipment.
In a typical year, CNF serves over 750 researchers, with between five and ten new users arriving at the start of each week. The staff provides weekly orientations, user training sessions, technical support, and individualized project support. But by design, there’s no attempt to direct their researchers’ work, or have it conform to any particular vision.

“We don’t do peer reviews, we don’t second guess their ideas, and we don’t try to reinvent their wheel,” says Skvarla. “All we do is evaluate their ideas for feasibility. The application process is very simple — we just need to confirm that what they’re proposing will be possible to do with our equipment. We have a knowledge base here, which is one of our most important resources: the technical support of an experienced staff. We know what the current research is like, what people are doing in other labs and other countries. So we offer researchers a consultation, train them to use to tools, and provide the guidance for them to work on their own.”

Earlier this year, CNF’s Knight Lab home moved to spacious new quarters in Duffield Hall, providing a 16,000 square-foot clean room laboratory, with an additional 30,000 square feet available for related nanoscale research. After 25 years, some of the lab’s original equipment, including a set of optical microscopes, are still being used — and are actually more flexible and better suited to CNF’s users than some of the latest, more complex instruments. And as part of filling its new home, CNF continues to buy new, more sophisticated equipment to expand its range of services.

“The new facility gives us a more extensive tool set, better control of the environment, and greater versatility,” says Skvarla. “It’s given us increased cleanliness, increased space, and because of all the funding that goes along with it, we’ve been able to get new equipment. In the old lab, if we bought a new piece of equipment, we had to throw an old one out, like having too many shoes to fit in your closet. Everything now is much more modern, better attuned to the research that goes on here. It’s like driving a shiny new car.”

In the past, CNF has facilitated breakthroughs in biology, chemistry, optics, and microelectromechanical structures; in the present, its researchers are pioneering work on an accelerometer that can detect minute fluctuations in the earth’s gravitational field, and a microscopic laboratory-on-a-chip that can test the effects of drugs on the human body.

“Over the last 25 years, we’ve enabled several thousand research projects that could not have been done elsewhere,” says Rathbun. “Our technology and our mode of operation have been particularly effective in bringing nanoscale technology to a variety of new fields, like basic biology and basic physics. There have been thousands of Ph.D.s awarded to students working in our laboratory, and at one time or another, most of the scientists working on electron beam lithography have come here.”

Along with their impact around the world, the advances at CNF have made their mark on the Ithaca community, as engineers have built on their research to create new high-tech businesses like Advion Biosciences, BinOptics, Calient Optical Components, and Kionix, many of which are located in Cornell’s Business and Technology Park. Funded primarily by the National Science Foundation, CNF users, and Cornell University, the new lab is already a popular destination for local middle and high school students, who get to wear full-length Tyvek suits as they tour the facility. One of CNF’s upcoming projects is the creation of a science magazine for fourth and fifth grade students.

As the technology continues to expand, it’s impossible to predict where the next developments will occur, and where CNF will find itself 25 years from now — or even five or ten. But wherever the research goes, CNF is dedicated to being at the leading edge. “At CNF, we plan to keep evolving as the technology evolves,” says Rathbun. “As long as there’s continued research in nanotechnology, CNF will be there.”

“CNF will go wherever the research takes it,” says Tiwari. “This is where the brightest minds will continue to come, and this is where they will make their major contributions to society. By doing what we do best, maintaining this character of openness, CNF will succeed, Cornell will succeed, and the nation will succeed.”

Kenny Berkowitz ’81 is a freelance writer in Ithaca.