Nanocenter is a continuation of the highly succesful, but much smaller Center of Excellence (CoE) in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology funded in the period 2004-2008 from European funds. The present Nanocenter builds on experience and good working practices developed in the previous fiunding period, and now includes the equipment infrastructure of the original CoE.
In its present form Nanocenter was designed in 2009 to address the challenge imposed by extremely rapid development of nanoscience and nanotechnology (N&N) in the world by joining together the efforts of all the leading research groups and industry leaders in the field into a consortium of 4 leading research establishments and 15 companies, whose common goal is to set up a technological infrastructure platform for the competitive development of N&N in Slovenia in the next decade.
The establishment of Nanocenter was funded from ERDF and national funds from 2009 – 2013.
The basic goals of the Nanocenter are to achieve a sustainable model of financing state-of-the-art research infrastructure in Slovenia, which combines state-of-the-art, multi-institutional basic research and industrial measurements with high professional qualifications and competitive equipment.
We are confident this is the only way to achieve better professional support for users, greater administrative and technical efficiency and expand the circle of users.
From the very beginning the vision of Nanocenter was to be sustainable after 2013, so we have chosen the equipment carefully in such a way that it is of interest to many partners, including industry. The equipment ensured us a significant level of competitiveness in the field for the next decades.
In spite of the fact that in many areas the equipment at the Nanocenter is, and will be, relatively modest compared to the competition at the best universities and institutes with which we collaborate (Jozef Stefan Institute, Chemistry Institute Slovenia, PSI, Stanford, ETH, EPFL, Cambridge, Orsay…), we believe that its multiplicative impact will benefit scientists and increase our competitiveness in attracting students and post-docs worldwide.
One of Nanocenter main goals is to bridge the gap between what academia can offer and what industry can absorb in order to achieve a higher level of technological development in industry and increase the added value of its products.
In 2011 Nanocenter introduced booking system for equipment which allows easy access and simple online reservation for equipment which has a large percentage of users.
For other equipment the contact with responsible researcher is published on the web site.