Experimentalists adopt a new nanoHUB tool within six months

The Network for Computational Nanotechnology brings researchers together through nanoHUB.org, providing shared discovery tools and knowledge resources that enable them to build upon each other’s work—and, fast.

In less than six months from the day three researchers at the Penn State Center for Nanoscale Science published a new simulation tool, researchers at the Advanced Technology Institute Nanoelectronics Centre at the University of Surrey, United Kingdom, cited the tool in their new manuscript.

Michail J. Beliatis had been using several different programs to simulate plasmonic nanostructures when he came across the Extinction, Scattering and Absorption Efficiencies of Multilayer Nanoparticles tool on nanoHUB. “I found the tool particularly useful because it was giving very good approximation with the experimental data,” he says.

Beliatis and colleagues Simon J. Henley and S. Ravi P. Silva, from Advanced Technology Institute Nanoelectronics Centre, cited the ESAEMN tool in a paper submitted to Optics Letters on July 23, 2010. The ESAEMN tool had been published on nanoHUB January 29, 2010, by Bala Krishna Juluri, Jun Huang, and Lasse Jensen.

“The fact that the tools in nanoHUB are running on the cloud, allowing users to operate them without need for installation locally, is revolutionary and particularly valuable in research facilities where the computers are administrated and no software installation policy applies,” Beliatis says. “The tool was easy to use with well documented tutorials. Furthermore, it allows storing your simulation data online for evaluation later on. The tool comes with a DOI reference number, which allows you to cite it. This is particularly useful for publications.”

The Beliatis, Henley, and Silva paper, “Engineering the Plasmon Resonance of Large Area Bimetallic Nanoparticle Films by Laser Nanostructuring for Chemical Sensors,” was published April 29, 2011. Within ten months, their work was cited in a paper authored by researchers from the National Institute for Materials Science in Ibaraki, Japan.

Optics Letters published the paper by Qinghua Wang, Satoshi Kishimoto, and Yusuke Yamauchi on the hexagonal digital moiré method for three-directional structural characterization of hexagonal packed nanostructures on February 15, 2012.

By the fall of 2012, 386 nanoHUB users on six continents had run 6,528 simulations with the ESAEMN tool.

Writer: Jennifer Crowell, communication specialist, Network for Computational Nanotechnology, 765-496-6541, jmcrowell@purdue.edu

2012.09.30