My wife is a manager of a nanotechnology lab and a clean room, so I've heard some of the things you have to deal with and how much of a pain in the neck it is to maintain the instruments and the room's conditions.

Yeah, I'm working in a rather unclean lab (it's just an instructional lab) and it's still a pain-in-the-ass. I can't imagine what a real research/industry-quality cleanroom would be like.

Also, is she hiring? : )

She spends hours every day maintaining instruments and making sure that users are being responsible. It's hard to believe that many graduate students and doctors don't follow procedures, proper documentations and disposals.
Part of what her lab does is surface characterization and bio-imaging. So I've gotten to see some cool pictures of nanostructures.

Nanotech labs with a clean room are then probably the only establishments where you won't encounter people full of shit since they won't be allowed in!

LOL, they were hiring two positions just a few months ago, but one is only a temporary position, so it's actually not out of the realm of possibilities.
If you want to send me your bio/cv through email, I will give it to her.

Yeah, no kidding. Grad students (myself excluded, of course) are horrible at taking proper care of machines. It's because they don't get enough hands-on experience as undergrads. All they do is math.

Yeah, you can get some awesome pictures. I bet the bio ones look particularly cool.

@zul

I've sent you a PM.

Yeah, they are. One of the projects they are trying to launch this year involves studying the effects of nano-particles on living tissues/embryos.

Yeah, that's a big area for research. We're steaming full-speed ahead with nano research, but no one has any idea the effects these particles have on humans.

She would hate having me in her labs. I don't even want to be near those damn machines. I would just want to do the theoretical work and have someone carry it out. I myself am horrible with following procedures. :)

My thesis is all theoretical (well, computational), but I'm thinking of getting more into experimental. Math is fun, but I don't like it as my whole job.

did u get it clean.

i recommend 409

^this hate-age is a mask for my shame stemming from having no inkling of what smart-guy-stuff you're talking about

Spic 'n Span is better than 409.

Nah man, use a classic, Clorox.

Also, abge, what you're doing sounds incredibly interesting, though I have no idea what the things you mention are

In university, for a 4th year project, a group of us made a maskless photolithography rig. It was just a projector and a few lenses but the concept of etching without a mask is pretty cool.

The room, like yours, wasn't exceptionally clean but we were still able to get some nifty (I think that's the only word you can use when describing something as nerdy as this) results.

At any rate, although the science is pretty interesting, I couldn't stand being a clean room and I'm not nearly detail oriented enough to get into experimental work so I decided not to go down that route. Hope you enjoy it though.

Comet - it makes your skin turn green;
Comet - it tastes like gasoline;
Comet - it makes you vomit;
So take some Comet, and vomit, today!

@ 'no inkling of what smart-guy-stuff you're talking about'

let me try. For any kind of procedure involving nano-scale fabrication, you want to prevent random bits of dust falling on any of the moving parts which you are using.

I've never seen anything like this in operation, at least not a clean room, i've only help assemble some vacumn sealed machinery (all my undergrad was computational, i like to avoid real experiments/instruments at all costs) i actually don't know why one would use a vacumn instead of a clean room, or when either would be preferable... i imagine that vacumn sealing stuff is very expensive (heavy metal containers strong enough to hold up under atmospheric pressure are expensive)

meanwhile you'd probably fit bigger machines into a clean room... (but then you have to make sure your people don't bring dirt in with them... )

now i'd love it if someone who knows better can correct all the mis-understandings i've just demonstrated...

@Yonni

Nice. You're in the Power Sector now, right? I did my senior project on load-side frequency management for the power grid, so I guess we swapped interests : )

Maskless photolithography is very cool indeed. There's a neat video on it here (http://www.mapperlithography.com/technology/mapper-technology). No sound though, which is rather lame. I assume you did something a little less involved, but, nonetheless, that must have been rather intense to work on.

@orath

That's more or less right. When you make things very small, there are two problems:
1) Everything needs to be to a very high accuracy. You can't get away with being a mm off, because that's 1000x larger than some of your feature sizes.
2) Dust particles and other contaminates are orders of magnitude larger than the feature sizes. Understandably, you can't have a piece of dust that's larger than your circuit land on your device.

I'm not too familiar with using vacuums. Do you mean a true vaccum, or just suction? Because clean rooms have incredible suction infrastructures to keep particles out. For a very small, extremely high precision work, I suspect a vacuum container would be better, but it's obviously very limited in what you can do with it.