Facilities

We have 3000 sq ft laboratory space with general laboratory benches for 10 researchers, a materials fabrication laboratory, an ultrafast optical laboratory, and an ultrasonic thin film printing room.

The Materials Fabrication Laboratory (MFL) is equipped with a Denton Vacuum Discovery 18 Deposition System with multiple sputtering sources, a Sharon Vacuum E-Beam Evaporator System with multiple crucibles and substrate heaters, chemical hoods, and various Rapid Thermal Annealing (RTA) and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) furnaces for thin film production and research. The Discovery 18 Deposition System uses three sputter sources (Two DC/DC pulse and one RF) and has the ability to heat, apply RF bias, and rotate the substrate. The source size is 3” dia., and wafer sizes up to 5” can be accommodated. Argon, Oxygen, and Hydrogen can be employed as process gases. Energy levels are up to 300 W for DC and 600 W for RF. Vacuum of 2E-8 is achievable by means of an Alcatel rotary vane mechanical roughing pump and an Alcatel TMP-151 turbo molecular pump. The Sharon Vacuum system includes Telmark four pocket 6-kW electron beam gun, single thermal source with SCR controlled 2-kW power supply, Sycon deposition controller, dual shutters, CT-8 cryo. pump, and water cooled rotary substrate stage. There are also a full range of characterization equipment available in the MFL and Hunter College including TEM, NMR, FTIR, Raman, X-ray diffraction, electronmicro -analysis, SEM, STM/AFM, electrical transport measurement system, Solar simulators, and all kinds of optical spectrometers.

The Ultrafast Optical Laboratory (UOL) is equipped with time-resolved pump-probe spectroscopy, nonlinear optical spectroscopy, and near-field microscopy based on a mode- locked Ti:sapphire oscillator (Tsunami, spectra-Physics), a Ti:sapphire Amplifier (RegA9000, Coherent), an Optical Parametric Amplifier (OPA9400, Coherent) and, one box femtosecond amplifier systems (Libra-F-1K-HE-200), TOPAS-Prime (1160-2600nm), and TOPAS-Prime-UV-1 (290-1160nm). The facility has a capability to vary the wavelength of laser sources a range from 400 nm to 2000 nm. We now have one of only several (fewer than 10) such facilities in the U.S. access to a broad, gap-free wavelength range from UV to the mid IR (210 nm – 2.6 μm). For the low temperature dependent studies, two Janis optical cryostat systems including the continuous flow model (ST-300) and the other model (VPF-100) with a built-in nitrogen reservoir can be used. The accessible temperature ranges from 1.4 K to 325 K. For high temperature experiments, a home-made vacuum chamber can be used to perform time-resolved optical measurements with a temperature up to 1000 K. Moreover, an alpha300S Scanning Near-field Optical Microscope (SNOM, WITec) can be employed to study optical reflection, photoluminescence, electro-luminescence, time-resolved photo-luminescence, confocal and multi-photon imaging with ~ 50 nm spatial resolution. The experiments can be carried out by combining with the existing time-resolved optical spectroscopy with a temporal resolution of ~ 50 fs. The operative wavelength range of the instrument is from 400 to 1050 nm which covers the most interesting spectra of the materials in our research.

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The ultrasonic thin film printing room is equipped with a Sono-Tek ExactaCoat coating system for non-vacuum fabrication of thin films. The ExactaCoat machine is a fully-enclosed, programmable 3-axis robot that is ideal for any precision lab scale spray coating application. This flexible, fully contained coating system employs robust ball-screw slides driven by brushless DC servo motors.