FACILITIES

SAMPLE PREPARATION

- Magnetron DC and RF sputtering systems
- Evaporation deposition system
- Home made High Vacuum Chamber for evaporation and thermal treatment of samples. Ion etching.
- Reactive ion etching
- E-beam and UV optical lithography.
- Clean room (approximately class 10000) and clean laminar hoods (approximately class 1000).
- Arc furnace, including ultra fast quenching system for fabrication of metallic amorphous materials
- Standard and controlled atmosphere furnaces for thermal treatments
- Controlled partial pressure and temperature system up to 1000C
- High oxigen pressure furnace in the 1000C, 200 atmosphere range.
- Chemical synthesis of nanoparticles.

PHYSICAL PROPERTIES CHARACTERIZATION

Structure
- X-ray diffractometer (powder and Laue)
- Transmission Electron Microscopy
- Scanning Electron Microscopy with EDS and WDS.

Atomic and electronic properties of surfaces
- Atomic force microscope
- Scanning tunneling microscope
- Ion accelerators that cover the 0.1 to 120 keV energy range connected to a High-Vacumm - chamber with radiation facilities, and three Ultra-High-Vacuum (UHV) collision chambers:
Two of them are equipped with a custom made cylindrical mirror electron and ion energy analyzer, with time-of-flight (TOF) ion and neutral spectrometers, with facilities for sample cleaning and evaporation, and techniques for surface analysis like AES, ISS, and Direct Recoil Spectroscopy.
- A New UHV chamber is being assembled. It will be equipped with a rotatable TOF spectrometer, a rotatable electrostatic energy analyzer, and surface analysis techniques such as low energy electron diffraction (LEED), Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), ISS, and Direct Recoil Spectroscopy.
- UHV chamber (10-10 Torr) equipped with ion and electron guns, x-ray and UV photon sources, an hemispherical electron energy analyzer, a quadrupole mass spectrometer, a LEED screen, and facilities for evaporation, sputtering and heating/cooling the sample. Standard techniques like XPS, UPS, LEED, AES, EELS, and SIMS.

Magnetic properties
- EPR Bruker Spectrometer: EPR, ESR, FMR, AFMR, ENDOR measurements. Available frequencies: 1.7GHz (L-Band), 9GHz (X-Band), and 35GHz (Q-Band). Range of Temperatures: 100K - 300K (L-Band), 2K - 300K, 100K - 450K and 300K - 1000K (X-Band), 2K - 300K (Q-Band)
- Mössbauer Spectrometer. Tuned for Fe. Temperature Range: 4K - 1000K
- Faraday Balance. Temperature Range: 270K - 1200K
- Lake Shore Vibrating Sample Magnetometer
- High precision low- field SQUID magnetometry
- SQUID magnetometry
- AC Susceptometer

Electric transport properties
- Magnetotransport Equipments: dc and ac electrical resistivity, magnetoresistance, Hall effect, I vs. V curves. Up to 18T.
- Dielectric Constant in Conductors and Vibrating Reed
- Thermoelectric power . Home made equipment .

Optical properties
There are two optical tables with state-of-the art equipment for optical and in particular Raman spectroscopy which include:
- Triple Jobin-Yvon T64000 Raman Spectrometer. The spectrometer includes a liquid-N2 cooled - charge coupled device (CCD), a photomultiplier optmized for the 400-850nm spectral range with photon counting electronics, a liquid-N2 cooled InGaAs solid state detector for measurements in the infrared (1200-800nm), and a photomultiplier for the visible-UV spectral region (250-700 nm).
- A home-made confocal microscope (resolution below 1 micron) for micro-Raman and reflectance difference experiments.
- Single Acton Research Corp. ARC300 spectrograph with TE-cooled back-illuminated UV-enhanced CCD detector
- Argon-ion laser model Spectra-Physics 2017-5S with single line operation with lines between 514.5 and 457 nm, and 6 W all-lines power.
- Argon-Kripton laser model Spectra-Physics 2018 with single line operation with lines between 647.1 and 457 nm, and 2.5 W all-lines power.
- Titanium-Sapphire laser model Coherent 890 tunable between 700 and 900 nm.
5W diode pumped solid state laser model Spectra-Physics Millenia-Vs.
- Cryogenic capabilities for optical experiments with controlled temperature in the range 2-300K
- Xenón lamp (75 Watts dc-power) with emission in the range 250-1000 nm for optical transmision and reflectivity measurements.

Cryogenics
- Nitrogen liquefactors with a production capacity of 30l/h
- Helium liquefactor with a production capacity of 30l/h
- Helium purifier system
- Storage and distribution dewars.

Computational facilities:
A cluster consisting of 1 server (Pentium II 400 MHz, 128MB) and 26 clients:
- 8 Dual Pentium III, 1 GHz, 256MB
- 13 Dual Pentium III, 800MHz, 256 MB
- 2 Dual Pentium II, 400MHz, 512MB
- 2 Pentium III, 500 MHz, 1 GB
- 1 Pentium III, 800 MHz, 1 GB

Others
- Specific- heat measurements
- Thermal expansion measurements under magnetic field.
- Mechanical oscillator in the 1K-300K temperature and 0Oe-80.000Oe magnetic field ranges.
- Bitter magnetic decoration.
- Closed cycle cryocoolers in the 10K - 400K temperature range.