The Materials Research Center (MRC) cleanroom facility is devoted to materials processing, growth, device fabrication, characterization and electronic & photonic materials. The MRC cleanroom complex in Cook Hall provides microfabrication and thin film processingcapabilities. Facility includes class 100 and 1000 cleanrooms. The facility provides microfabrication tools for general use by the Northwestern community, government and industrial researchers. Various techniques are available for the growth, preparation and processing of a wide range of thin film materials including in-process characterization. Training of equipment and assisted use within the MPMF is available to provide the necessary expertise.

This provides a centralized resource for the deposition of metal, semiconductor & dielectric thin films, photolithography, and processing. Standard microfabrication processes have been established. Available techniques include plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition, e-beam evaporation, atomic layer deposition, reactive ion etching, photolithography, bonding, rapid thermal processing, Hall Effect Measurement and some characterization instrumentation.

Shared facility operated by the Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience (NCMN). The function of the Electron Nanoscopy Instrumentation Facility is to provide hands-on access to electron microscopes, sample preparation equipment plus data collection and data reduction instrumentation, along with advice, training and research collaboration. The scope of the facility is materials characterization of the topography, morphology, elemental composition, crystalline microstructure, crystal defects, and atomic arrangements of materials, largely on a scale from 10 micrometers down to the near-atomic level.

This new facility consists of an SEM (FEI XL-30) for electron-beam lithography, a probe station (Cascade 12000) for electrical characterization, and three scanned-probe microscopes (SPMs) for in situ electrical measurement of devices concurrent with electrostatic force and scanned-gate microscopy. One SPM (DI-Dimension 5000) is configured for electrically contacting samples, and another SPM (JEOL-4210) has controlled environment (ambient to high vacuum, 120-800K) and electrical feedthrus for in situ electrical measurements. This facility is operated cooperatively with the Department of Physics.

The Materials Computation Center (MCC) provides a facility for education and research on materials computational analysis and simulation for MRSEC researchers and the broader materials community. It is designed to function as a hub to connect experimental and computational activities through the organization of collaborative projects, short courses and workshops. For the MRSEC experimentalist, the MCC can provide the information needed to add a simulation component to their work. For groups already working on materials simulation research, the MCC is a natural environment for interaction and extension of existing techniques. The MCC provides users with access to hardware and software, as well as consulting.

Instrumentation:

Software provided by the MCC currently includes electronic structure and total energy codes like VASP, WIEN2k, GAMESS, Gaussian03, Cache, NWChem, and CPMD.

MRL Facility Director: Nathan "Fuzzy" Rogers fuz [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu (805) 893-4495

The MRL as part of the UCSB Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) offers an array of specialized High Performance Computing (HPC) environments to support research. The CSC provides both the hardware to run calculations as well as consulting and training services to assist in the optimal use of HPC facilities.

High Performance Computing Environments:

The typical CSC computational resource is a linux Beowulf cluster. The CSC currently has 5 clusters of v arying sizes and most with optimized high-speed interconnect. Our standard hardware configurations cover the following environments.

• Standard Beowulf Clusters 2000+ cores (and growing!)
• Large Memory compute nodes (RAM = 512GB)
• Extra Large Memory computer nodes (RAM = 1000GB)
• Dedicated Graphical Processing Units nodes (GPU nodes)

We also host three 'condo clusters' where researchers buy nodes in a cluster used only by participating groups. The CSC pays for cluster infrastructure and administers the system, allowing all of the financial resources of the researchers to go to increased computational throughput.

High Performance Computing Software

Software can provide an important and critical step in obtaining research results in a timely manner. The CSC strives to meet the needs of its users and has licensed and installed the following software (some are licensed only to particular groups, indicated with *).

• Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package (VASP) for atomic scale materials modeling*
• Gaussian for electronic structure modeling
• Allinea DDT for debugging parallel and GPU code
• Abaqus for simulations and analysis*
• Assorted additional software and libraries including MATLAB, R, Intel compilers, fftw 2 & 3, etc.

If additional software resources are needed but not listed, please let us know.

Facility Use

CSC accounts are available to UCSB students, researchers, and collaborators. Condo cluster accounts available only to participating groups.

Faculty Director:

safinya [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu (Professor Cyrus Safinya)
Technical Director

youli [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu (Dr. Youli Li)

Staff Research Associate

miguelz [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu (Miguel Zepeda)

Location

MRL 1012,1032 and CNSI (Elings Hall) 1409 (UCSB Campus Map)

The MRL X-ray Facility provides state-of-the-art x-ray diffraction tools for characterizing structural properties of a wide range of materials including metals and composites, polymers and biological materials, and electronic and optoelectronic materials in the lengthscale range of 0.1 nm - 100 nm. As a key research asset of the MRL, the x-ray facility is accessible by MRL researchers as well as off-campus academic groups and industrial users. In addition to maintaining an array of commercial and custom-built specialty instruments, the facility staff also conducts active research in developing new x-ray imaging methods and instrumentation to advance the capabilities of x-ray characterization techniques.

Management, operation and acquisition of equipment for the X-ray facility is supported by the Materials Research Laboratory: an NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC).

Our floating zone furnace (Crystal Systems Inc.Model FZ-T-12000-X-S) employs four halogen optical lamps to achieve crystal growth temperatures up 2100ºC at pressures of 10-8 - 10 bar and is particularly suited to the growth of oxide single crystals. It permits growth of both congruent and incongruent melting systems. This system is utilized to prepare crystals with high spin polarization, as well as ferroelectric materials.

Facility Director

hawker [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu (Professor Craig Hawker)

Technical Director

Dr. Rachel Behrens, rachel [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu

Training

Users of the MRL Synthesis and Characterization Laboratory are required to go through two levels of training before they are authorized to perform data collection independently. The training consists of

1. General lab safety training, provided by the UCSB Environmental Health & Safety Department (EH&S).
2. Instrument training, conducted by the manager Rachel (rachel [at] mrl [dot] ucsb [dot] edu) or an authorized user delegated by the laboratory manager.

Scheduling for Instruments

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