The very small is getting very big at Trinity College Dublin. State funding of €10 million announced last week means the creation of CRANN, the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices.
CRANN, to be headed by Trinity's Prof John Pethica, is a joint effort that will also involve research teams from University College Dublin and University College Cork.
The effort will focus on the world of the invisibly small devices - just atoms across - that will form the foundations of the next information technology revolution.
Yet the research coming out of CRANN will have applications across many sciences, says Prof John Boland, one of five senior nanotech investigators from Trinity who will work within CRANN.
Support for CRANN comes via Science Foundation Ireland.
The five Trinity researchers had won support in earlier funding rounds, and the group and the college immediately saw the potential for building this expertise into something more.
"We wanted to have a dedicated nanocentre so we could get a truly international nanotechnology programme going," says Prof Boland.
"We needed to group together the key people in the area who would be at the forefront of nanotechnology."
With this in mind the group bid for, and won, the additional funding for the creation of CRANN. While the other Trinity investigators are physicists, Boland is a physical chemist.
"We realised we needed people who could synthesise and develop new materials," he said. "I wanted to bring in UCC and UCD to add their expertise in the chemistry area." They also brought in industrial partners, including Intel.
One of the advantages of the earlier funding was that Trinity already had a large dedicated centre for nanotech research.
This purpose-built facility will now support the fresh CRANN activity, which will involve the work of up to 150 researchers, says Prof Boland.
The research team has identified four key areas, he says.
The first is membrane and fluid interfaces, for example the complex point of contact between cells and between cells and other substances. A detailed knowledge of how molecules interact in these interfaces is central to the ability to deliver new drug treatments and develop new medical products, says Prof Boland.
The team will also focus on the linkages between say a tiny electronic device and a connecting wire that allows a signal to be read.
These devices will be so small that the contact point will influence how a nanocircuit performs.
Two other research goals are in the area of pattern formation and "spin" circuits. Existing chip technology depends on laying down patterns on silicon using photographic techniques.
These will be too crude for the next generation of devices, however, and CRANN will help bring new technologies forward for pattern formation. Spin electronics is also a new area that involves electronics based on the direction of electron spin around an atom. It depends on an entirely new paradigm in computing but one that will deliver new kinds of computers.