Lab Tours

Just to give a brief update on the Nanoscience course thus far...

On Thursday this week, we attended class at the Komaba campus, which is about 1 hour away from the Hongo campus where class is normally held. The professors lectured about nanoscience and nanotechnology in the fields of the physical sciences. And for the lab tour, we were allowed to visit a clean room!

In order to maintain the cleanliness and the dust-free condition of the laboratory, we were required to adorn the special green outfit that covers every part of the body except for the face and hands. After which, we also had to enter a small chamber to be air-blown clean. As we subsequently visited other clean rooms on later days, we learned that the clean rooms actually differ in terms of the number of particles in the room atmosphere. There are rooms with 10000 particles, 1000 particles, 100 particles etc. And the cleanest one that we saw has only 1 particle! As compared to the millions of particles in the normal atmosphere in modern metropolitan cities, those figures are really astonishing! 

 

The clean rooms contain elaborate equipments like this Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE). The machine provides a high vacuum compartment conducive for manufacturing semiconductor devices, such as transistors. Depending on the type of semiconductor material to be manufactured, different models of MBEs are used.

This is another of the laboratories in Todai. The light used is yellow in color, so as to reduce the exposure of the experimental materials to UV.