The Nanoscience Centre occupies a site at the north east corner of the Cavendish Laboratories. The main activity in the building is making individual devices or structures which are only a few nanometres in size and then measuring how they work. The building was completed in early 2003.
The building is of one storey throughout. Offices for researchers and technical support, together with a small meeting room have been designed to be set into the berm so as to reduce their visibility from Clerk Maxwell Road. To the west of the office area is a laboratory which is split into a clean room facility for the fabrication of the nanometer scale devices and structures, and laboratory space for characterisation of the same. The size of these devices is already much smaller than the dust particles filling the air around us.
Air in the clean room is forced through fine filters in the ceiling of the building and recirculated along with a percentage of fresh air. The filtered air in the clean room prevents contamination of the devices by the atmospheric dust. Within this room various types of patterning and fabrication will be carried out.