Who we are

Nanofab-net aims to serve as a centralised source of knowledge related to micro- and nanofabrication. Currently, the know-hows of nanofabrication are often limited to lab books or in the supplementary information of a published paper or thesis. As a result, there is a vast amount of knowledge that remains unshared (e.g. the failures and other tests of a process flow) with the wider research community.

Nanofab-net addresses these issues by publishing the notes and observations that researchers make in their daily work but often not shared. We firmly believe that we can learn as much from our trials as we can from our successes. By publishing reports documenting the failures that occur in certain processes or with a particular material, we hope to shed more light on the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of nanofabrication. This would also serve to provide greater background information for new researchers and foster greater understanding within the community. Ultimately, this would save time and resources for researchers and inspire new collaborations across different institutions and groups.

We accept submissions in various formats (e.g. PDF, powerpoint etc.) and publish them in an open access repository (Zenodo). There is no specific format or citation style to follow; we want to make it as easy as possible for you to share your expertise without worrying about formatting and publishing guidelines. When published, each article is given a DOI where they can be cited in other publications.

Every article will be tagged and filtered according to different materials and processes so as to be easily searchable by fellow scientists. There is also a comments section for each entry to allow other members to share their own experiences pertaining to the report or provide feedback that might help to address the issues you’ve highlighted.

We also archive the full version history of your articles and keep all the versions. This allows researchers to update their work and create a new version with minor or major revisions.

• Preserve your legacy - Ensuring the records of your experiments do not get lost for future grad students in your group
• Benefit from the expertise of fellow researchers - Learn from similar experiments being done; or receive feedback from readers via comments
• Help to optimise your fabrication process - Learn from what others have done to avoid starting from scratch
• Archive of knowledge on the field - Helps you to have a better understanding when starting new processes
• Easy citation format - Ensures your articles are found easily. Can be used to supplement the information in your theses and papers
• Better understanding of intermediate steps in micro and nanofabrication - Such information is often lacking in published sources so we help to bridge this gap so as to facilitate the optimisation of your own fabrication processes. Learn from the mistakes and experiences of others!

NanoFabNet was founded by Prof. Tobias Kippenberg (Principle Investigator of Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements - LPQM) and Mohammad Bereyhi (Graduate Student at LPQM) in February 2019. Our infrastructure is hosted in EPFL, Switzerland. We realized there was a need for a place to share information about trials, failures and successes in nanofabrication and wanted to provide a platform for this. We are funded by EPFL’s Open Science initiative.

We collaborate with many cleanrooms, universities and research institutes. Are you interested in joining the NanoFab-Net community? Contact us!