Carleton’s engineering and science departments have big plans for three systems that will do incredibly small things.
They will be housed in the Facility for Nanoscience, Surfaces and Sensor Interfaces (FANSSI).
Two will arrive in December, while the third Carleton is collecting bids for, facility director Sean Barry said.
They are called the co-evaporation system, the chemical vapour deposition system (CVD), and the atomic layer deposition system (ALD).
Together they will allow Carleton researchers to deposit extremely thin films onto different materials.
The ALD works on a scale from just one to hundreds of atoms thick. The CVD is in the territory of hundreds of thousands of atoms, while the co-evaporation system deals with “thicker thin films,” Barry said, allowing films in the millions of atoms to be deposited.
“All of these are about a millionth of a millimetre, or a billionth of a metre,” he said.
The lab is interested in depositing materials on silicon, because they are interested in micro-electronics and photovoltaics—solar cells.
Barry said there are some restraining factors on what can be deposited onto what.
Paper and wood, for instance, are difficult to be deposited onto by harder materials. Harder materials require higher temperatures to vaporize—200 or 300 degrees—that may cause paper or wood to charr or decompose. Cellulose, for example, Barry said would decompose around 170 to 180 degrees.
He said if the lab could drop temperatures lower it would be great, for example, to deposit copper onto paper.
“Not for any real application,” he said, “but just because nobody really can do that.”
“You don’t know what your applications are until you know what you can do,” he said.
“You want flexible displays, you’re going to have to be able to deposit on plastic. If you want cheap, disposable displays . . . you could make micro-electronic devices out of paper,” he said.
FANSSI was created with a $1.9 million investment September 2011 from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Barry said 40 per cent is paid by the organization, 40 per cent by the Ontario Government, and 20 per cent from industry grants.
The lab is managed by Barry, photonics professor Jacques Albert, and associate professor Steven McGarry from the department of electronics.
The research is not limited to metals and plastics.
McGarry said the systems can layer hybrids of organic and inorganic materials.
“My expertise for this project looks at materials such as silica-based materials, that are coated with thin films, that are then coated by organic materials,” he said.
Barry said although the project was funded for research, the FANSSI lab will be available to senior undergraduate students in science and engineering programs for independent research projects.
“The various departments involved with this project share that attitude that research is teaching,” he said.
