Facilities & Equipment

The Laboratory of Quantum Materials for Sustainable Technologies is located in Gary L. Thomas (GLT) Energy Engineering Building (0.228, 0.230, and 0.244A-E) of the main campus and the Microelectronic and Engineering Research Building (MERB 2.508 & 2.510) of the J. J. Pickle Research Campus. GLT 0.228 is an optics lab for inelastic light scattering measurements. GLT 0.230 houses an Omicron ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) scanning tunneling microscope (STM)/atomic force microscope (AFM) inside a low-noise chamber.  GLT 0.244B houses a superconducting magnet system and two closed-cycle cryostats. GLT 0.244(A,B,E) houses a glove box, growth furnaces in chemical hoods, and flow cryostats. MERB 2.510 is equipped with a Hamilton chemical fume hood, two wet sinks, gas lines connected to hydrogen and methane cylinders located in a separate gas bunker below the lab, and exhaust lines. MERB 2.508 and 2.510 are located above the class-100 clean room facility on the first floor of the building.

Major equipment in the Laboratory of Quantum Materials for Sustainable Technologies includes:

An Omicron variable-temperature UHV STM/multimode optical beam deflection AFM
Horiba iHR320 Core 3 Raman spectrometer with a SYN-1024×256-BD-PS CCD camera
JRS Scientific Instruments TFP-1 Brillouin Light Scattering Interferometer
Montana Instruments low temperature magnetic cryostat with optical viewports (3-350 K, 0.3 Tesla)
A Janis superconducting magnet cryostat (1.7-325 K, 0-9 Tesla)
Two Janis closed-cycle cryostats (4-500 K)
Two Janis continuous flow helium optical cryostats (4-500 K)
Two Janis high-temperature continuous flow helium optical cryostat (4-800 K)
A liquid helium Dewar with a home-made variable-temperature insert (4-300K)
A Netzsch laser flash equipment (148 to 1473 K)
Netzsch Differential Scanning Calorimeter (123-1273K)
An Olympus 41 fluorescence microscope
One MBraun glovebox with moisture and oxygen analyzers
A nanomaterials synthesis facility consisting of a number tube furnaces and gas lines for chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of carbon nanotubes, graphene, graphite foams, h-BN, and chemical vapor transport (CVT) growth of semiconductor nanowires and nanoplates
Two Lindberg box furnaces (1100°C and 1200°C)
One Carbolite three-zone tube furnace (1200°C)
Thirteen SRS 830 lock-in amplifiers
One Zurich Instruments UHF Lock-in Amplifier (100 MHz)

We have access to the following shared laboratory facilities: (i) a class-100 clean room CMOS and MEMS fabrication facility at the Microelectronics Research Center (MRC), which is supported by NSF as a user facility for nano-imprint lithography in the National Nanofabrication Infrastructure Network (NNIN), (ii) a nanofabrication and characterization facility in the Center for Nano and Molecular Science and Technology (CNM), (iii) a materials characterization facility including transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) in the Texas Materials Institute.
Major equipment in the shared user facilities includes:

Two Digital Instrument Dimension AFMs;
A WiTec micro-Raman microscope;
An JEOL JBX-6000FS electron beam lithography (EBL) system that is capable of patterning 20 nm features on wafers of various sizes up to 6-inch;
A Raith-50 EBL system for small wafer pieces;
A FEI dual beam scanning electron microscope/focused ion beam tool equipped with a Zyvex nanomanipulator;
A Hitachi S-4500 field-emission scanning electron microscope;
A LEO-1530 scanning electron microscope;
A high resolution JEOL 2010F transmission electron microscope;
A FEI TECNAI G2 F20 X-TWIN TEM that has allowed us to characterize nanotubes and nanowires grown or assembled on our suspended micro-devices with an etched-through hole;
Infrared spectrometers;
Photolithography equipment including a double-sided aligner;
Chemical vapor deposition furnaces for thin film deposition;
Evaporators and sputtering machine for metal film deposition;
Reactive ion etchers;
A deep reactive ion etcher
Thermal Technology MODEL SPS 10-3 Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) equipment