Groundbreaking Ceremony for New Nanocenter at Brookhaven Lab, October 3

September 27, 2005

EVENT: Congressman Tim Bishop, First District of New York, and Dr. Patricia Dehmer, Associate Director for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences, will be among the dignitaries participating in a groundbreaking ceremony for the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Media representatives are invited to attend.

WHEN: Monday, October 3, 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

WHERE: Brookhaven National Laboratory. Take Brookhaven Avenue east to Rochester Street; turn right, proceed to tent. The Laboratory is located on William Floyd Parkway, one-and-a-half miles north of Exit 68 of the Long Island Expressway.

DETAILS: The Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at Brookhaven Lab will be one of five Nanoscale Science Research Centers to be built at DOE national laboratories. The CFN was designed by HDR Architecture, Inc., of Alexandria, Virginia, and is being constructed by E. W. Howell Co., Inc., of Woodbury, New York. The 94,500-square-foot building will be a state-of-the-art laboratory/office facility that is expected to attract an estimated 300 researchers from the Northeast annually.

Funded by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences, the $81-million facility will provide specialized equipment and a precisely controlled environment for researchers to investigate the properties of materials at nanoscale dimensions. These materials - typically on a scale of billionths of a meter, or 1,000 times smaller than a human hair - have different chemical and physical properties than bulk materials, and could form the basis of new technologies. The completion date for the construction of the CFN building is March 2007, and initial experiments are expected to begin soon after that date.

NOTE TO MEDIA: Please call Diane Greenberg, 631 344-2347, or Mona S. Rowe, 631 344-5056, if you plan to attend this event. All visitors to the Laboratory age 16 and over must bring a photo ID.

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