Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

NSERC-RTI funds are requested for a new probe station for four-point electrical conductivity measurements at varying temperature, from cryogenic (10K) to ambient conditions. Although Western is home of such a vibrant materials science community, it is dramatically underequipped for electrical measurements in the temperature domain. There is currently no research tool at Western that is suitable to electrical measurements from cryogenic to room temperature, or even in small portions of this temperature interval. Equipment of this type is only available in other universities at no less than 100 km. Access to their equipment is often not viable in practice, for a number of reasons including delicateness of samples that are not transportable, and travel costs. To the best of our knowledge, we are one of the few research-intensive universities in Canada lacking this type of broad-use equipment. This deficiency is currently jeopardizing several research plans, and we are in urgent need of an infrastructure that is currently unavailable. In addition of being a general-purpose instrument that will satisfy a critical need from a vast research community at The University of Western Ontario, the proposed probe station is uniquely suited for specific measurements by the team of coapplicants, for instance solar cell internal photoconversion efficiency and electroluminescence measurements at low temperature. Electrical conductivity measurements at varying temperature are essential to characterize the electronic structure of a large class of materials -- metals, semiconductors and insulators, and to gain insight into the relationships between their fabrication parameters, electrical transport properties, and other functions that specific materials are expected to play. Currently, there are more than 50 NSERC-funded research teams at Western that are active in developing and investigating inorganic and organic semiconducting materials, biomaterials, photonic materials, and materials for energy device applications. They encompass three Western faculties (Science, Engineering, as well as the Schulich School of Medicine Dentistry) and they are clustered in the Centre for Advanced Materials and Biomaterials Research (CAMBR, see: http://www.uwo.ca/cambr). It is estimated that a total of more than 500 HQPs are currently being trained in CAMBR by the Western materials science research community, with more than 1,200 HQPs trained over the last 6 years. The largest number of these HQPs are experimentalists, for which training in general-purpose materials science experiments, including electrical measurements at varying temperature, is vital to complement specialized knowledge offered by their particular research projects. Eleven of the most active groups of the Western materials science research community are planning to extensively use the probe station, and are part of this proposal.