NEST Research Group Facilities
The research of the Nano Engineering & Storage Technologies Research Group is particularly concerned with phenomena occurring on the submicron and nanometer length scales. To expedite this work it has, with others, committed itself to the establishment, support and future development of the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology. Many of the Group facilities are shared with the Centre and many of its projects are part of the Centre activity. Facilities available allow the production of thin film materials, advanced microscopy for materials observation and analysis, lithography, and device fabrication and testing.
The group has at its disposal a large clean room with several bays (class 100, class 10 under hoods), three clean rooms (class 1000), a general laboratory, measurements laboratory and chemicals and characterisation laboratory. It has equipment for advanced disk and tape recording, optical recording, electronic test and development, sensor design and fabrication, sensor testing, force and optical microscopy, thin film deposition, lithography, and device fabrication.
The group uses fine line lithography using optical and electron beam systems, housed in a 150 m2 of class 100 (class 10 under hoods) clean rooms to fabricate nano-magnetic structures for data storage and sensor applications. Sputtering and evaporation systems are available for deposition of soft and hard magnetic materials, metallic conductors and multilayers. Plasma etch and ion beam milling facilities allow sub-micron resolution patterns to be reproduced in the thin film materials.
Two precision disk spin stands and a precision X-Y translation system are available together with a wide range of tape and disk systems for studies of magnetic recording and recording systems and for comparison with simulation. An X-Y Scanning Laser Microscope together with a commercial Magnetic Force Microscope are available for studies of magneto-optic and probe recording and for imaging and characterisation of a wide range of magnetic materials. All of these systems are housed in clean room conditions.
Two low field shielded enclosures allow the characterisation of magnetic sensing systems in low ambient noise conditions. High and low field alternating gradient force magnetometers allow magnetic characterisation of thin film materials and a precision four-point probe system allows resistivity measurements on thin films with high resolution.
The group makes use of the University Silicon Graphics Origin parallel computer and the EPSRC Cray T3E massively parallel supercomputer for micromagnetic modelling and advanced recording simulation.