An Interdisciplinary Virtual Laboratory on Nanoscience

The Swiss Virtual Campus project ”Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory” realises a virtual laboratory for the booming field of Nanoscience. Nanoscience laboratories are expensive and only major companies and organizations sponsored by research programmes can aord their usage. With a concept of distance education, complex and sensible experimental equipment can be shared through the Internet. Three main topics are realized in the framework of a virtual laboratory: user management, communication and co-operation, and the control of virtual experiments. The basic architecture is based on a multitiered client-server model. Each nanoscience experiment is implemented as a stand-alone web-service.