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SCIENCE AT THE CNMS

The Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a Department of Energy / Office of Science Nanoscale Science Research Center (NSRC) operating as a highly collaborative and multidisciplinary user research facility.  The CNMS is one of five DOE NSRCs that form an integrated national user network. Each NSRC is associated with other major national research facilities at one of DOE’s National Laboratories, enabling their application to nanoscale science and technology.  The central organizing concept of CNMS is to provide unique opportunities to understand nanoscale materials, assemblies, and phenomena, by creating a set of scientific synergies that will accelerate the process of discovery. 

AFM Images

AFM images of Fe nanodots and nanowires on flat and stepped NaCl surfaces (edge length 750nm)

To accomplish this, the CNMS integrates nanoscale science with three highly synergistic national needs:
• Neutron Science, using the Spallation Neutron Source, SNS, and the recently upgraded High Flux Isotope Reactor, HFIR.
• Synthesis Science, or what we call “science-driven synthesis,” facilitated by extensive and novel synthesis capabilities in the first three CNMS Research Capabilities areas listed at the bottom of this page and by a new Nanofabrication Research Laboratory.
• Theory, Modeling and Simulation, through establishing a new Nanomaterials Theory Institute, with close connections to the staff expertise and computational capabilities of ORNL's Center for Computational Sciences and the new national Leadership Scientific Computing Facility.

The CNMS's research capabilities provide a broad community of scientists, engineers, and students from throughout the nation, but particularly the southeastern United States, with ready access to the full range of tools and collaborative capabilities needed for nanoscale research, in a single location.

Scientific Themes
CNMS research focuses on understanding, designing, and controlling the dynamics, spatial chemistry, and energetics underlying functionality and properties of nanoscale materials, systems, and architectures.

Electronic and Ionic Functionality on the Nanoscale

  • Developing instrumentation and techniques to image and understand the functionality of nanoscale materials and interacting assemblies
  • Research on optoelectronic, ferroelectric, ionic and electronic transport, and catalytic phenomena at the nanoscale
  • Understand energy transfer at nanoscale interfaces

Functional Polymer and Hybrid Architectures

  • Advancing our fundamental understanding of the links between polymer structure, property and function that are controlled by weak intermolecular interactions and interfacial phenomena
  • Understanding the role of macromolecular topology on self-assembly
  • Understanding how the optoelectronic properties of conjugated material architectures and hybrid systems are determined by their structure

Collective Phenomena in Nanophases

  • Builds on strong theoretical and experimental efforts focusing on understanding the emergence and remifications of collective behavior
  • Developing and applying multiscale methods to understand and predict how atomic structure, nanoscale confinement, and quantum mechanical effects impact electronic processes/properties within materials and across interfaces
  • Understanding nature's 'rule of composition; to enable synthetic nanostructured systems with capabilities rivaling those of living systems

CNMS Research Capabilities

 

 



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Updated Friday, 08-Mar-2013 09:08:31 EST