What's inside IBM's quietest room in the world?

Explore IBM's quietest room in the world

If you want to perform a scientific experiment separating individual atoms from molecules, you must need professional equipment and above all a powerful microscope. However, those glasses will become useless when the surrounding environment is chaotic with many sounds vibrating the lens.

The quietest room in the world is IBM's nanotechnology research room.

However, don't worry too much because in the city center of Zurich (Switzerland) there is a scanning electron microscope located in IBM's Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center with not a single speck of dirt, not a single speck of dirt. noise from outside, protected by an electromagnetic shield, anti-vibration and especially very 'cool' in the literal sense.

Special structure of each room

Inside the center there are 6 underground soundproof rooms to completely eliminate all sounds from sound waves, physical vibrations to electromagnetic radiation coming from the outside. Each such room has its own function. One is equipped with a Raman microscope for molecular research; one uses an optical microscope but uses electron beams instead of light to observe. Surrounding the rooms is a thick layer of nickel-iron alloy. So, in these rooms, don't expect to receive a call.

One of the "quietest" research rooms in the world.

In addition, each room is made into two areas: a lobby - where the operator sits - and a main space with equipment to isolate human noise from the experiments because humans just need to breathe to create it. The amount of sound and vibration is not small. Besides, each room also has 2 separate floors. One suspended floor is for scientists to walk around and the other floor is not really a floor but a giant concrete block with an air suspension system that prevents large vibrations from trucks on the ground.

Scientists will work in an environment without even the slightest noise.

And finally, the smart air conditioner makes no noise and has the ability to blow out as little air as possible but still maintain a constant, stable temperature (21°C). Meanwhile, on the suspended floors there are tiny holes. The blown air will go up through these holes, reach the ceiling and be sucked out. Therefore, the room hardly had any wind.

The "coldness" of these rooms is unbelievable

With such meticulousness, the price is certainly "not affordable" - about 90 million USD!! Of which 30 million USD is spent on equipment. Worthy of such a huge amount of money, these rooms are known as 'the quietest in the world'.

The room's vibration resistance is extremely impressive, able to reduce the vibration speed of incoming sound to less than 300nm/s at 1Hz, and less than 10nm/s at 100Hz. Although it can isolate outside sounds well, it cannot reduce the small noises of the engine. The sound level here is always below 30dB, a level that humans can barely hear.

So why does IBM produce these buildings?

When you reduce vibration, sound... everything that affects the research process, you will get 2-3 times clearer images on glass than in normal conditions without soundproofing. In addition, the researchers also wanted to see how well it performed when in "near" perfect condition.

Going back in history, in the 80s and 90s, IBM researchers had to operate in the basement of the headquarters because at that time there were no specialized nanotechnology facilities, let alone soundproof rooms like today. Until Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer invented the "Scanning Tunneling Microscope" (STM) and worked day and night to find a way to block the sound from cars on the side of the road and then they won the Nobel Prize in physics. In 2011, IBM built a soundproof headquarters in Zurich as we know and took the names of these two inventors and applied their inventions to the research industry.