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CORVALLIS - A new state-of-the-art "cleanroom" at Oregon State University is opening doors for the university to venture into new avenues of research, scientists said. The facility is located at the university's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences W.M. Keck Collaboratory for Plasma Spectrometry. The system, which puts OSU in a leadership position in cleanroom technology in the United States, was made possible in part with donations from HuntAir, Performance Contracting, ChemWest Systems, GE Industrial Systems and Westlake Plastics Co.

"With this new cleanroom technology, there's a great deal more that we can do now that we couldn't do before," said Gary Klinkhammer, an OSU professor of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences and collaboratory director.

A cleanroom is a controlled environment where levels of dust, microbes, and other contaminates are reduced - usually by continual "flushing" with highly filtered air, Klinkhammer said. "This facility will be used as a showcase for cleanroom technology. Our current facility has cleanhoods and cleanbenches, but having an actual cleanroom will allow the university to do new, more precise research.

"For example, we'll be able to look at and detail minute quantities of substances that may be in the water and food and other items ingested by humans," Klinkhammer pointed out. "We can do dating of moon and earth samples and look at the signatures of microbes in extraterrestrial rocks. We can also do a better job studying things closer to home, like salmon migration."

With the collaboratory's high-tech capabilities, researchers from around the world will be able to participate in experiments remotely via transmission on Internet, he said. The collaboratory is one of the most powerful analytical laboratories in the world and is essentially a university without walls, Klinkhammer said. The facility links state-of-the-art geochemical analysis capabilities to one of the most extensive computing networks for marine research in the world.

The center includes a multicollector plasma mass spectrometer and excimer laser equipment capable of detecting precise isotope ratios of many elements on very small samples. There are only a few such combinations in the world.

"With these new spectrometers, the laser and the cleanroom we can determine the elemental and isotopic composition of just about anything," Klinkhammer said. "This is extremely powerful and useful technology."