An Interdisciplinary Virtual Laboratory on Nanoscience

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Abstract

Nanoscience is a booming field with manifold applications. Nanoscience equipment (e.g., microscopes) are however expensive and only major companies and organizations sponsored by research programs can afford on-site installation. Based on the Internet as a global communication platform, distance education and remote usage might offer a working environment by which complex and sensitive instruments can be shared. The Swiss Virtual Campus (SVC) project has exactly the following goal: establish a Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory to be shared and used by a distributed user community.

Three main topics need to be realized in the framework of a virtual laboratory: user management, communication and co-operation, and the control of virtual experiments. The basic architecture of the prototype is a multi-tiered client–server model which supports individual nanoscience experiments to be implemented as a stand-alone web-service.

Author Keywords: Remote experiments; Virtual laboratory; Distance-learning; Nanoscience grid