SCOPE OF INSTRUMENTATION & CHARACTERIZATION

The mission of the RIIF is to capture the needs within and outside of AIST for interdisciplinary instrumentation and characterization and to carry out R&D works for meeting them. In this light, interdisciplinary keywords, “transition and transposition phenomena” and industrial technology keyword, “reliability” will be taken up, to pay efforts for developing instrumentation and characterization technologies for understanding, controlling and utilizing the phenomena, as well as spin-off control technology. The coverage of dynamic phenomena such as transition and transmutation may open the way to dream instrumentation for complicated and correlated systems.

Instruments and methods for measurement and characterization with sensitivity and resolution at the level of atoms and molecules are of generalized nature to be actually applicable to various areas of industry. The strategy for dealing with the situation is to build up a two-tier organization: a platform, or a core part to meet the fundamental needs of instrumentation and characterization and to be shared by various groups; and an interface or peripheral part to cope with specific requests of individual areas so as to cover as diverse fields of specialty as possible. The RIIF is organized on the basis of “platform-interface” model, with seven research groups sharing a platform of instrumentation to pursue fundamental R&D works emphatically and aggressively. The deployment based on this model also applies to the characterization where the knowledge is acquisitioned through “viewing”.