Between partners, we have access to a wide range of state of the art research facilities. Here is an overview of our capabilities.
Pulsed laser deposition (PLD)
In PLD, short pulses of a high-energy laser ablate small amounts of a target material by evaporating them into a plasma inside a vacuum chamber. The ablated material is deposited on a substrate opposite to the PLD target. Depending on the deposition conditions such as temperature, partial pressure, or laser energy and frequency, PLD can deposit very pure and uniform epitaxial crystals or completely amorphous thin films. For example, the chamber in the photo was used to deposit ferroelectric thin films of rhombohedral hafnium oxide. PLD is particularly well suited for oxide deposition as a partial oxygen pressure in the evacuated deposition chambers allows for accurate control of the oxygen content of the thin films.
Our systems also have RHEED and XPS capabilities connected to the same vacuum system to allow detailed studies of materials deposition without exposing them to atmosphere.
Spatial Atomic Layer Deposition (SALD)
In conventional ALD, the deposition substrate is exposed to the precursor gases sequentially in time, i.e., first to precursor 1, which is then purged from the chamber to make room for precursor 2 afterwards, and so on. In SALD instead, the precursor gases are separated spatially. The precursor gases stream out of the precursor head continuously, but are separated by inert gas outlets between the different precursors. The substrate is then exposed to the precursors by oscillating the precursor head over it and by this movement, the substrate is exposed only to one precursor at a time. While thin films can be deposited with the same quality as in conventional ALD, SALD is a much faster process, because it does not require the purge times of conventional ALD. We have even demonstrated deposition of epitaxial films with this system and the setup has been replicated in several other labs around the world.
Sputter Deposition
We procured a new state of the art AJA sputter deposition system in 2023, which is situated in the CAPE cleanroom.
Electrical Measurement Suite
We have several electrical characterisation suites, one of which in the photo below. It comprises a probe station, two ferroelectric testers (Radiant and Aixacct), a versatile source/measure unit (Keysight B2912), and an impedance analyser (Solartron Analytical). The setup is used on a daily basis by many different users for a wide range of applications including standard current-voltage measurements, but also demonstrations of neuromorphic learning capabilities, and battery and fuel cell research.
More content coming soon, e.g., on sputtering, X-ray diffraction, Atomic Force Microscopy, UV lithography, Transmission Electron Microscopy, ...