BY DAVID BROWN
UCLA Today

Three University of California campuses, including UCLA, have formed the Center for Nanoscience Innovation for Defense (CNID) to boost discoveries about infinitesimally small-scale nanosystems, develop new ways to apply their findings in advanced technology and support graduate students.

A joint venture of UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside, CNID is funded with an anticipated $20 million from two federal agencies — the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and Defense MicroElectronics Activity — to support nanotechnology in U.S. defense systems. Also participating are Los Alamos and other UC national labs, along with 10 industrial partners.

CNID is an outgrowth of concerns in federal research circles over the decline of basic research in the nation’s major industrial laboratories, research that has traditionally fueled innovation in American industry.

The new center will fall under the umbrella of the California NanoSystems Institute, created two years ago at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara via an initiative by Gov. Gray Davis. State and private funds for CNSI have gone primarily toward the construction of new research facilities at the two campuses. CNID funds will equip those facilities with state-of-the-art instrumentation and will support graduate fellowships.

At UCLA, the new center is being led by Electrical Engineering Professor Eli Yablonovitch. He is the inventor of the photonic crystal concept that has many applications in science and engineering, particularly in nanophotonics, one of a number of broad research areas being targeted by CNID.

“The new center will permit UCLA to continue to contribute to the real nanotechnology of the future,” Yablonovitch said, “through its support for the centralized instrumentation needed for progress in the nanoworld and in support for fellowships to attract the best graduate students in the world into nanosystems research.”

CNID will offer unique opportunities for graduate student researchers to gain industrial research experience through collaborative projects and summer internships. Already planned are exchange programs in nanotechnology with researchers at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and North Dakota State University.

Nanoscience research at UCLA will focus on the development of quantum telecommunication technology, the creation of a single-electron spin microscope for imaging a protein molecule, nanophotonic integrated circuits and new circuit components at the moletronic level.