An Interdisciplinary Meeting Space

The MCP is the core facility at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) that serves as a hub for interdisciplinary materials research and characterization through a suite of advanced tools to process and examine materials from the macroscale to the atomic scale. JHU has investing >$25M into a new state of the art facility with >13,000 sq. ft. of lab, classroom and office space in the landmark Stieff Silver foundry building. The MCP@Stieff collected existing and new tools for testing physical properties, fabrication of new materials, and characterization of inorganic and organic materials in a state-of-the-art vibration and electromagnetic field free environment. The MCP is fully staffed with specialists and administrators to ensure proper maintenance and streamline administration. The MCP@Stieff Silver building includes office space for visiting researchers, classrooms for teaching, seminars and public outreach. These new facilities are also linked to the Advanced Research Computing at Hopkins (ARCH) and the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) computing facilities through high-speed fiber optic connections enabling interactive AI design of data acquisition and materials manufacture.

The Stieff building is designed with future equipment in mind and all efforts have been made to create the best possible rooms for equipment. Our Type I rooms, which are low vibration, electromagnetic field-free, acoustically dead environments with passive cooling panels with low air current flow, and adjacent control rooms (Figure 1) house the most sensitive instruments. This ensures the top performance of tools. Vibration-producing equipment such as roughing pumps, etc. are placed in the equipment chases that are adjacent to every instrument room. A new preparation lab has been constructed that houses new cutting, grinding, polishing and coating equipment, and electrochemical polishers and a PIPS II ion mill supporting TEM sample preparation. The Thermo Scientific Helios 5 FIBSEM residing in one of the Type I rooms provides sample preparation of TEM foils using its Easy Lift Out and AutoTEM automation software. Type II rooms are reserved for less sensitive equipment such as the µCT, XRD, and spectroscopy.