High vacuum systems with thermal and/or electron guns are used to deposit metals, semiconductors and insulators upon customer demand. High vacuum as well as reactive sputtering is used for metal alloy as well as simple oxide thin film preparation. [more]

Oxides with strong electron correlation, play an increasingly important role in current condensed matter physics due to their intriguing interplay of spin-, charge-, and orbital ordering superimposed with lattice interactions. Single layers, heterostructures and superlattices of different materials such as cuprates, manganites, cobaltates, titanates and vanadates are at the core. Pulsed Laser Deposition techniques (PLD) are used as standard method. [more]

The new Oxide MBE system enables the growth of novel oxide heterostructures and superlattices based on single atomic layers sequences. This includes e.g. metastable poly-types, deletion and addition of atomic layers, synthesis of new artificial compounds (e.g. NiLa_2-xSr_xCuO_5+δ), engineering inside atomic monolayers,  doping of selected atomic monolayers, modulation of doping/delta doping and precise defect control within a single atomic layer and interface                     [more]

Structures with feature sizes down to ≈1μm are routinely fabricated by optical lithography in a clean room in combination with wet chemical or dry chemical (ion milling, reactive ion etching) techniques. Ion milling techniques combined with etching end-point detection based on mass spectroscopy allow high precision etching of heterostructures and superlattices of complex oxides. Electrical contacts to samples of various types are prepared by combining evaporation/patterning techniques with ultrasonic wire bonding. [more]

Our laboratories are equipped with different characterization techniques to provide fast and reliable information about the quality of thin films and heterostructures, including Atomic Force Microscope for analysis of surface morphology and surface roughness, X-ray diffractometer to characterize the crystal structure and the interfaces quality, profilometer to measure thin films thickness and different express set-ups to measure resistivity, mutual inductance in range from room temperature (300K) down to liquid Helium temperature (4.2K). [more]