Images from the UofL NanoImaging Facility. (left)SEM photo of diamond pyramids made by UofL. WYKO NT-2000 picture (center) of silicon pyramids, device courtesy of G. Neudeck at Purdue Universtiy. AFM picture (right) which is an enlarged view of a crater on one silicon pyramid.

LOUISVILLE, KY-- In February, the University of Louisville established a new analytical imaging facility with microscopes that can determine the three-dimensional shapes of ultrasmall objects approaching the scale of individual atoms. The Three-Dimensional Nanoscale Imaging Facility features several high-resolution instruments useful to researchers and industries in fields such as electronics, medicine, chemistry and physics.

Today's industries need to build devices smaller than optical microscopes can examine, according to Robert W. Cohn, an electrical engineering professor and Director of the ElectroOpitcs Research Institute. The facility will allow users to see materials up to 5,000 times smaller than light microscopes permit.

Funding for the $340,000 facility includes a recent $150,000 National Science Foundation grant for two of the instruments -- an atomic force microscope and a white-light scanning interferometric microscope. The two will complement a new scanning electron microscope. The instruments, which are be housed in the new Academic Building on Belknap Campus, support several federally funded studies and also are used for university graduate laboratory courses. Cohn described the facility as a significant enhancement of the state's research and technology infrastructure.

The NSF proposal involved faculty from U of L's electrical engineering, physics, chemical engineering and chemistry departments, as well as University of Kentucky's electrical engineering department. The directors are Cohn and chemical engineering faculty members Mahendra Sunkara and Raul Miranda.

For more information, call Robert Cohn at (502) 852-7077.