Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

This proposal is for the purchase of a custom-made ultra-high vacuum sample-transport system, or vacuum suitcase. This device will allow easy, reliable, and secure transfer between the key experimental facilities that propel the quantum material effort at UBC, where surfaces and heterostructures of these novel materials are prepared with atomic precision. In addition to the Quantum Materials and Devices Foundry (QMDF) where films and heterostructures are grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE), this include extremely surface sensitive techniques to study their momentum- and atomically-resolved electronic structure, such as Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES) in Damascellis Quantum Materials Laboratory (QML), Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy in Bonn and Burkes LAIR facility, or Sawatzkys newly funded Quantum Materials Electron Microscopy Centre. A key role will be played also by the UBC beamlines at the Canadian Light Source (CLS), i.e. the Quantum Materials Spectroscopic Center for spin-ARPES and the Resonant Elastic and Inelastic X-Ray Spectroscopy beamline. This state-of-the-art research effort, aiming at enhancing the Canadian leadership towards understanding and exploiting the properties of quantum materials, is missing the ability to move carefully prepared but highly air sensitive thin film and heterostructure samples from facility to facility. For example, QMDF is on the verge of becoming operational with the expectation that many oxide thin film samples will be routinely grown and require detailed characterization by each of the facilities mentioned above. At the present time, we do not have any reliable means by which samples can be grown at UBC, measured, and then taken to the CLS for further study. In fact, we cannot even transport samples between the QML and the STM laboratory at UBC without exposing samples to air and severely degrading their quality. The equipment applied for here will allow samples to be shuttled freely between all of the facilities mentioned. The Quantum Materials Laboratory has been in close collaboration with Ferrovac, a leading company for the transfer and manipulation of materials in UHV environments, to develop a custom transfer system designed for the QMLs specialized bullet sample holder. However, up to now, this custom system has only been implemented for the transfer of a sample within each individual experimental research apparatus. This new vacuum suitcase design is based on the same sample holder system (unique to UBC), and ensures that all of the facilities will be fully compatible allowing easy and UHV compatible sample exchange between them. The addition of this reliable ultra-high-vacuum suitcase transport system, which includes the transfer mechanism developed and used at UBC, will enable measuring the materials fabricated at UBC on any of the facilities accessible to our researchers.