Facilities

The CCMR Shared Facilities, offer sophisticated instruments maintained and enhanced by expert staff, who assist and train researchers. Students using CCMR facilities have the rare opportunity to receive personal, expert training in experimental techniques, both complex and routine.

Our facilities provide maximum productive use of scientific instrumentation and research expertise, ensuring that the highest quality equipment, instruments, and services are available to users, at Cornell and elsewhere including other universities and industry. The seven CCMR shared experimental facilities occupy over 20,000 ft² of space and are clustered near users on the Arts and Engineering Quads.

All CCMR facilities charge user fees in accordance with Cornell, NSF and OMB regulations. In addition to our MRSEC funded researchers, our facilities serve individuals in 37 departments across 5 colleges and 6 Centers at Cornell. CCMR facilities have supplied instrumentation and expertise to many companies and academic institutions, non-profit organizations and national laboratories. Potential users are encouraged to contact the appropriate facility staff or the Director of Shared Facilities.

Integrated Advanced Microscopy Facilities

The integrated advanced microscopy facilities at the Cornell Center for Materials Research offer a broad range of instruments supported by trained professional staff, who assist researchers as they prepare, image, and analyze their specimens. Students, faculty, and industrial scientists make use of the wide variety of electron and optical microscopes to characterize and image their specimens. The most advanced instruments—housed in specialized rooms to minimize such effects as vibration, electromagnetic fields, and temperature fluctuations—have reached levels of performance seldom found in laboratories. Three full-time staff members knowledgeable about the instruments, characterization techniques, and specimen preparation are available for consultation and training. Each staff member has areas of individual expertise and general knowledge about campus experimental resources. If you are in doubt as to which technique will best suit your needs, any of the managers can provide guidance and direction.

 

Hudson Mesoscale Processing Facility

The facility provides the Cornell research community with comprehensive instrumentation and technical services to characterize thermal, mechanical, electrical, and optical properties of soft materials, such as polymeric and biological materials. The facility also offers effective solution, melt, and bulk processing for soft materials. Special emphasis is placed on micron- and submicron-length material specimens, which are essential for successful studies on structure, property, and functions of many materials and biological systems.

 

Polymer Characterization Facility

Equipment for evaluating all the important characteristics of polymeric materials is available at the Polymer Characterization Facility. Materials can be evaluated in several ways: Studies of molecular weight and solution behavior Two lines for size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) provide information on composition, molecular weight, refractive index, radius of gyration, and hydrodynamic volume. Thermal analysis State-of-the art equipment is capable of monitoring all transitions that occur in solids under a prescribed heat flux.

Materials Facilities

This facility provides a very wide spectrum of services and apparatus for materials testing, preparation, and characterization. The facility emphasizes close interaction between staff and users. We value hands-on involvement of students more than efficiency, since new and innovative solutions to research problems and effective graduate education require some trial and error.

 

X-ray Diffraction Facility

Offering a number of distinct advantages for materials research, this facility houses four X-ray diffraction instruments, including an automated powder diffractometer, a small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) instrument, a general area detector diffraction system (GADDS), and a real-time Laue instrument. All types of materials, including polymers, clays, metals, and ceramics can be analyzed. Samples can be in powdered, single crystal, thin film, or bulk form. Little or no sample preparation is usually needed. X-ray techniques are completely nondestructive.

Molecular and Cellular Surface Imaging Facility

The goal of the MOCSI Facility (known informally as the Surface Facility) is to provide tools that can generate images of surface or near-surface characteristics, such as topography or electronic structure, at length scales from microns down to nanometers in environments ranging from ultra high vacuum to fluid. The primary tools are specialized scanning probe microscopes (SPMs) that complement the capabilities of the standard SPMs found in the CCMR Materials Facilities and in other Cornell centers. Vacuum surface processing equipment, which can be configured according to users' needs, is also available for preparing samples prior to characterization.

 

Research Computing Facility

The CCMR Research Computing Facility supports the research goals of the Center in the areas of data acquisition, analysis, display of data, and computationally intensive modeling. The facility also supports information technologies that facilitate scientific collaboration, such as e-mail and web servers. The facility provides consulting, network administration, and security services, as well as system administration for computing workstations and clusters. An assortment of input/output devices are available, including scanners, two 60" poster printers, various grayscale, and color laser printers providing letter-size transparencies and single-sided or duplex paper printing.