Co-sponsored by The Nanostructures Lab, The Tiny Tech Club and Techlink. 

The Time Scales of Ion Beam Sculpting: 

Towards Building Nanopore Molecular Detectors for Rapid DNA Sequencing  

Professor Jene Golovchenko

Harvard - Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics; Professor of Physics

Overview of Dr. Golovchenko's Research

Background Papers for Talk:

Ion Beam Sculpting Time Scales- Derek Stein, Jiali Li, and Jene A. Golovchenko. Physical Review Letters, Dec 30, 2002. - Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 276106 (2002)

Ion beams can be used to fabricate incredibly small nanopores (~2 nm) to use as molecular detectors for ultra-rapid DNA sequencing. This lecture will focus on a a study of ion sculpting dynamics in SiO 2 and SiN using periodically pulsed ion beams reveals material transport that depends strongly on the time structure of the pulsed beams. It is found that significant nanoscale matter transport can occur over second long time scales after the ion beam has been extinguished. A simple phenomenological model described the dynamics of ion beam sculpting in terms of two material time scales. The model accounts for the surprising observation of enhanced matter transport affected by pulsed ion beams over continuous ion beam exposure.

Jene A. Golovchenko (Ph.D. 1972, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics, Harvard University. 

Jene Golovchenko is a senior professor in the physics department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard.  These two appointments reflect Professor Golovchenko's interests and contributions to various areas of fundamental and applied physics.  He is also a member of the research staff at the Rowland Institute for Science, a nonprofit multi-disciplinary basic research organization founded by Edwin Land.  He also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of BSA, the governing institution of Brookhaven National Laboratory.  Professor Golovchenko has served on numerous review panels, is on the editorial board of Annals of Physics, and Surface Science Letters, and is a member of the Science and Technology Advisory Board of Polaroid Corporation.  His research activities are currently supported by DARPA, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Office of Naval Research.   He is also an organizer of, and participant in, the Agilent Technologies - Harvard University Collaborative Research Agreement.

                Prior to his appointments at Harvard, Golovchenko was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill.  His total tenure at Bell Labs spanned 15-year period encompassing his Ph.D. experimental thesis work, a postdoctoral appointment and tenure as a member of the research staff, in the Radiation Physics Department and in the High Speed Materials and Phenomena Research Departments.  Golovchenko also spent three years in postdoctoral and faculty appointments at Aarhus University in Denmark.  Significant aspects of his research during these years required extended stays at accelerator facilities at CERN and DESY.

                Golovchenko's research career has spanned many disciplines with a main unifying theme in the study of the fundamental interactions of radiation and matter and the application of this knowledge to revealing and controlling the properties of materials.  A significant component of this research has been related to accelerators and energetic beams of electrons, protons, optical photons, X-rays and ions.

                The Cambridge Accelerator for Materials Science (CAMS) at Harvard is a 2 MeV tandem ion accelerator currently run under the auspices of an NSF MRSEC by Golovchenko.  It is a user facility that provides Boston area researchers with RBS, Channeling, PIXE, and Nuclear Reaction Analysis capabilities.  The facility, including installation of a commercial accelerator, development of experimental beam lines and data analysis capabilities, was planned, constructed and is now operated under the direction of Golovchenko.  A 5 nm focused ion beam facility has also recently been added.   Professor Golovchenko has analogous experience developing and operating experimental X-ray beam line facilities at Synchrotron (DESY) and Storage Ring (Cornell, NSLS) facilities.  He has conducted high energy particle experiments at the CERN PS and BNL's AGS and Dynamitron accelerators requiring similar skills.  His has lately designed and developed the MeV positron channeling beam line at the LLNL Pelletron facility.  Golovchenko's recent positron research has focused on understanding and developing a quantitative view of positron channeling phenomena in crystals

                Golovchenko has also contributed to the understanding of laser solid interactions, and  has made major contributions to understanding laser annealing and processing of semiconductors while at Bell Labs, and the demonstration of optically organized matter at the Rowland Institute.  He has also participated in the development of one of the early cold atom Bose Einstein Condensation capabilities, at the Rowland Institute, currently yielding multi-million atom sodium condensates.  That facility has grown to become the center for "slow light" research under the direction of Lene Hau. In the area of X-ray physics he is responsible for the development of X-ray standing wave techniques and their evolution into a quantitative tool for locating atoms in crystals and on their surfaces.  Golovchenko's tunneling microscope laboratory at Bell Labs was the first uhv instrument working in the US and was responsible for fundamental new insights into the surface physics of semiconductors and the fundamental physics behind the operation of the instrument.  Recently he has been investigating electronic methods of very rapidly detecting, characterizing and sequencing single molecules of DNA.  This activity has lead to the development of a new ion beam based method for creating nanoscale structures in semiconductors called "ion beam sculpting". 

                Golovchenko's research career is reflected in more than 145 published physics and applied physics journal articles.  His students occupy many teaching and/or research position at universities, national laboratories and industrial research laboratories.  In addition to advising undergraduate, graduate and post graduate students Professor Golovchenko has been actively involved in teaching at Harvard at the undergraduate level (Freshman Seminar Laboratory, Quantum Mechanics, Advanced Undergraduate Laboratory) and the graduate level (Advanced Quantum Mechanics, Advanced Electromagnetism, Solid State Physics, and Modern Optics).

©2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology