Things haven’t turned out exactly as planned at the University of Western Ontario’s nanoscale fabrication facility.

“Some of the problems we’re working map very directly onto the original statement of purpose in our application for funding,” explains Dr. Ian Mitchell, a professor in the university’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. “But we’ve also been taken in some quite different directions.”

The facility, funded in part by an investment by the Ontario Innovation Trust, was designed to allow researchers to synthesize, structure and evaluate new materials at nanometer scales. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.) The lab comprises advanced tools for etching, coating and patterning, all housed in a 3,700 square-foot “clean room”—very important in this context, since a single particle of dust can be thousands of nanometers across.

A key application of the lab’s nanoscale capability was to develop materials and structures that would accelerate the development of more powerful devices for information technology applications. That research has involved the use of incredibly narrow ion beams to machine features into silicon. Other researchers using the fabrication facility have been looking at ways to make silicon chips that process information by transmitting bursts of light from one component to another rather than by moving electrical charges. And completely new materials grown in the lab may play an important role in the development of quantum computing, a fledgling technology that promises computers thousands of times more powerful than today’s devices.

But while computing and photonics—the science of generating and controlling light—have remained important areas of research, scientists from other disciplines have also been attracted by the lab’s nanoscale capabilities. “The facility has drawn interest in areas we never anticipated,” says Dr. Mitchell. “Chemistry, biophysics, health sciences, to name a few.”

As an example, he cites the use of the lab to develop highly sensitive “nano-probes” used by biophysicists to study living cells. These finely machined tips are designed to be brought into delicate contact with the surface of an individual cell as a way of learning about living cell response to physical and chemical stimuli. “It turns out that the tools we have in the nanofab are very powerful for shaping and optimizing the profile of these extremely tiny tips,” explains Dr. Mitchell. “One researcher working here has been able to increase spatial resolution ten times over commercially available tips.”

Dr. Mitchell also points to other research being done at the lab in the emerging field of “bionanophotonics”—the use of light as a tag or signaling medium for things that happen at the nanoscale in living tissue. The new work could one day have wide-ranging impacts in diagnosing illness and in the development of new drugs.

The fact is, Dr. Mitchell acknowledges, that researchers are finding so many new applications for the facility that the original focus on materials for information technology is now giving up its central spot. “But I think that’s healthy,” he says, acknowledging that surprises are an important part of research. “You don’t want to think that you anticipated everything. Otherwise, you end up saying, ‘It turned out exactly as we thought. Boring!’”