The Molecular Foundry is a nanoscience user facility located at the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in the Berkeley Hills, hills of Berkeley, California, United States. Established i ...

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

, and is one of five national Nanoscale Science Research Centers sponsored by the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and energy production, the research and development of nuclear power, the military's nuclear w ...

Overview

The Molecular Foundry was founded in 2003. The building was completed on March 24, 2006. The current director, Kristin Persson, was appointed in 2020, following permanent directors Jeff Neaton (2013–2019), Omar Yaghi (2012–2013) and Carolyn Bertozzi (2006–2010). Users of the Molecular Foundry are provided with free access to instruments, techniques and collaborators for nanoscience research that is in the public domain and intended for open publication. Foundry users can collaborate with LBNL's broader scientific community, including user facilities like the Advanced Light Source (ALS), National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), plus the Energy Innovation Hubs, such as the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA), the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), and a number of local Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs). Proposals for user projects are aimed to promote interdisciplinary collaboration in the areas of

materials science Materials science is an interdisciplinary field of researching and discovering materials. Materials engineering is an engineering field of finding uses for materials in other fields and industries. The intellectual origins of materials sci ...

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

environmental engineering Environmental engineering is a professional engineering Academic discipline, discipline related to environmental science. It encompasses broad Science, scientific topics like chemistry, biology, ecology, geology, hydraulics, hydrology, microbiolo ...

biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...

and

chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

Facilities

The Foundry's six floors and NCEM operate as technically distinct facilities, each equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation, laboratories, and computational resources. These seven facilities include: * Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures, led by Facility Director Alex Weber-Bargioni and founded by Miquel Salmeron. ** Characterization and manipulation of nanostructures—from "hard" to very "soft" matter—combining

electron microscopy An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of electrons as a source of illumination. It uses electron optics that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope to control the electron beam, for instance focusing i ...

optical microscopy Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultravio ...

and

scanning probe microscopy Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) is a branch of microscopy that forms images of surfaces using a physical probe that scans the specimen. SPM was founded in 1981, with the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, an instrument for imaging ...

. *

Nanofabrication Nanolithography (NL) is a growing field of techniques within nanotechnology dealing with the engineering (patterning e.g. etching, depositing, writing, printing etc) of nanometer-scale structures on various materials. The modern term reflects on ...

, led by Facility Director Adam Schwartzberg and founded by Jeff Bokor. ** Advanced

lithography Lithography () is a planographic method of printing originally based on the miscibility, immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone (lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by ...

and thin-film processing emphasizing integration with chemical and biological nanosystems and the development of nanoscale electronic,

magnetic Magnetism is the class of physical attributes that occur through a magnetic field, which allows objects to attract or repel each other. Because both electric currents and magnetic moments of elementary particles give rise to a magnetic field, m ...

and photonic devices. * Theory of Nanostructured Materials, led by Facility Director David Prendergast and founded by Steven Louie. ** Theoretical support to guide understanding of new principles, behavior and experiments—including electrical transport in nanoscale molecular junctions, self-assembly of biological nanostructures and computation of

spectroscopy Spectroscopy is the field of study that measures and interprets electromagnetic spectra. In narrower contexts, spectroscopy is the precise study of color as generalized from visible light to all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Spectro ...

at hybrid nanoscale interfaces. * Inorganic Nanostructures, led by Facility Director Jeff Urban and founded by A. Paul Alivisatos. ** The science of

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...

, carbon and hybrid nanostructures—including design and synthesis of nanocrystals,

nanowires upright=1.2, Crystalline 2×2-atom tin selenide nanowire grown inside a single-wall carbon nanotube (tube diameter ≈1 nm). A nanowire is a nanostructure in the form of a wire with the diameter of the order of a nanometre (10−9 m). Mor ...

and nanotubes—and study of their electronic applications. * Biological Nanostructures, led by Facility Director Corie Ralston and founded by Carolyn R. Bertozzi. ** New materials based on the

self-assembly Self-assembly is a process in which a disordered system of pre-existing components forms an organized structure or pattern as a consequence of specific, local interactions among the components themselves, without external direction. When the ...

biopolymers Biopolymers are natural polymers produced by the cells of living organisms. Like other polymers, biopolymers consist of monomeric units that are covalently bonded in chains to form larger molecules. There are three main classes of biopolymers, ...

and bio-inspired polymers, new probes for bio-imaging and

synthetic biology Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a multidisciplinary field of science that focuses on living systems and organisms. It applies engineering principles to develop new biological parts, devices, and systems or to redesign existing systems found in nat ...

techniques to re-engineer organisms and create hybrid

biomolecules A biomolecule or biological molecule is loosely defined as a molecule produced by a living organism and essential to one or more typically biological processes. Biomolecules include large macromolecules such as proteins, carbohydrates, lipi ...

to interface with devices. * Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis, led by Facility Director Yi Liu and founded by Jean Fréchet. ** Studies of "soft" materials — including synthesis of organic molecules,

macromolecules A macromolecule is a "molecule of high relative molecular mass, the structure of which essentially comprises the multiple repetition of units derived, actually or conceptually, from molecules of low relative molecular mass." Polymers are physi ...

polymers A polymer () is a substance or material that consists of very large molecules, or macromolecules, that are constituted by many repeating subunits derived from one or more species of monomers. Due to their broad spectrum of properties, b ...

and their assemblies, with access to functional systems, photoactive, organic-inorganic hybrid and porous materials. * National Center for Electron Microscopy, led by Facility Director Andy Minor. NCEM was founded in 1983 as an independent DOE user facility and merged with the Molecular Foundry in 2014. ** Use and development of an array of electron microscopes, offering capabilities for materials characterization at high resolution.

Research Themes

Five research themes bridge these facilities. These themes are: *Architecting Information-Dense Multi-scale Materials *Atomically Precise Control of Energy and Information Flow *Nanoscale Science Towards a Sustainable Future *Accelerated Materials Discovery and Prediction *Physical and Digital Infrastructure as Drivers for Innovation

User program

The Molecular Foundry has a user program that gives access to the center's staff and equipment to external researchers who intend to publish their results. The program currently serves over 1000 scientists from academia, industry, and research institutes. The application process for the user program involves submitting a peer-reviewed proposal. Accepted proposals must be activated within one year, after which users receive one year of facility access.

References

{{authority control Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Nanoscale Science Research Centers Laboratories in California United States Department of Energy national laboratories University and college laboratories in the United States Research institutes in the San Francisco Bay Area