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It is delicate, precise work that will transform fields as far-ranging as energy, health, computing, and manufacturing.

MIT.nano houses a remarkably quiet imaging/metrology facility, an immersion lab for digital visualization, prototyping labs, chemistry teaching labs, and art galleries. Many of the building’s instruments have yet to be purchased; others have yet to be invented. The first to be installed—a pair of multimillion-dollar cryogenic electron microscopes housed in the basement—can image organic structures in 3-D near-atomic detail, a technology that only recently became commercially available.

In the meantime, one of the greatest resources MIT.nano has to offer is already in place: space. And exceptionally pristine space, at that. A major portion of the facility’s square footage is devoted to two capacious clean rooms  in which the air is scrubbed of dust and other contaminants that could disrupt research at the nanoscale.