4.E.2 Collaborations With Industry
Collaborations with industrial, government, and national laboratories are a vital part of the CSPIN
mission and operating structure. The importance of such collaborations to the success of the Center’s two
Interdisciplinary Research Groups is described below.
IRG1: The ability to fabricate assemblies of nanostructures opens up a range of collaborative
possibilities. Johnson’s AAO templates, for example, can be used to fabricate nanostructures from
various materials. John Kirtley at IBM Research Laboratory (Yorktown Heights, NY) will perform
scanning squid microscopy on nanorings and other nanostructures made at CSPIN from metals and
superconductors. AAO templates will also be used by CSPIN to etch nanoholes in GaAs quantum wells
grown at Sandia National Laboratories. The transport properties of the resulting nano-textured 2D
electron system will be studied at Sandia by Michael Lilly. One of Salamo’s students spent two months
with Eric Stach at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory fabricating indented GaAs samples, characterizing by
TEM, and is now using them as templates for organized MBE growth. The research results in the field of
colloidal nanocrystals carried out by Peng, Xiao, and Johnson will be communicated to our industrial
partners and collaborators (NN-Labs, Quantum Dots, Kovio, Kodak, GE) through existing channels.
The characterization facilities at CSPIN also create opportunities for interaction. For example,
Johnson will use CSPIN’s x-ray diffraction, TEM, and XPS equipment to study silica coated magnetite
nanoparticles for biological applications. The nanoparticles will be fabricated by Charles Sweeney at
NanoBioMagnetics (Oklahoma City OK) and Kenneth Dormer at the OU Health Sciences Center.
IRG2: Industrial collaborations are also an important aspect of the proposed research on
mesoscopic narrow-gap systems. With MRSEC support, Santos and three students visited NTT Basic
Research Laboratories (Japan) during the past three years. Each of the students stayed at NTT for ~10
weeks to fabricate and characterize ballistic transport devices made from heterostructures grown at
CSPIN. Murphy and Santos propose to continue to collaborate with Yoshiro Hirayama’s group on
several of the proposed quantum confined and spin devices.
During 2004, a CSPIN graduate student spent 10 weeks at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
(San Jose, CA). Under the guidance of Stephan Maat and Bruce Gurney, she performed experiments on
prospective materials for read-head sensors. Santos, Murphy, and Salamo propose to collaborate with
Hitachi on magnetic sensor applications for mesoscopic narrow gap devices. Narrow gap material will be
grown at CSPIN. Device fabrication and characterization will be carried out at Hitachi and CSPIN.
Local industry initiatives: The research performed at CSPIN has also had a significant impact
on local industry through the founding of three small companies. CSPIN has utilized the infrastructure
provided by the UA Innovation Incubator (I2) to advance its research successes into commercialization. I2
provides its clients with a graduate student for 12 months and $6K for materials or other expenses. In the
past three years, I2 has supported two client proposals originating from CSPIN research. Nanoferr Inc.
(Salamo and Bellaiche) focuses on the development of layered ferroelectric structures; and Minotaur Inc.
(Xiao) focuses on development of sensing technologies. I2 has also worked on the commercialization of
ten patents disclosures made by Salamo, Bellaiche, Fu, Peng and Xiao.
Peng is the founder of Nanomaterials and Nanofabrication Laboratories (NN-Labs) which has
licensed the intellectual property generated by his research group and is actively commercializing
colloidal nanocrystals. Since NN-Labs began an active phase in July 2002, it has received two Phase II
SBIR awards. NN-Labs has already marketed two complete product lines and three partial product lines
during the last year. With eight employees, NN-Labs is currently seeking three more fulltime additions as
they begin executing on Phase II programs. With support from the State of Arkansas and the University
of Arkansas through its Genesis Technology Incubator, NN-Labs is rapidly growing into a significant
high-tech startup company in this traditionally rural state.
C-SPIN will continue to generate research commercialization activities in technology-based
startup businesses. Progress is expected to accelerate as new research and technology parks are being
launched at both campuses. In fact, on the OU campus, McCann and his company, EKIPS Technologies,
are charter participants in the newly planned research park just south of the main campus.