One super-precise instrument in IBM's noise-free rooms is this spin-polarized scanning electron microscope, which can be used to gauge the exact details about magnetic materials. Samples that researchers investigate are placed inside a chamber with a vacuum as hard as in space above Earth.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)
ZURICH, Switzerland -- It's not so awful for most city dwellers when a passing subway train causes rumbling vibrations in the floor. But that sort of noise can make work impossible for a nanotechnology researcher trying to scrutinize atomic-scale phenomena.
That's why IBM has just finished building new noise-free labs at its Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center. The labs, which IBM showed off Wednesday during a news media tour at its research facilities here, are designed to block out just about every kind of disturbance to IBM's super-precise microscopes -- vibrations, audio and radio noise, magnetic fields, and even turbulent air.
It doesn't come cheap. The rooms cost about $50,000 per square foot to build, IBM researchers said in a paper published this August in the journal Nanoscale.
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