Facilities, equipment, and other resources:

Magnets and Cryogenics:

· Oxford Instruments 16-Tesla (64mm bore) Teslatron system for measuring resistivity, Hall effect, thermo-electric effects, and heat capacity. The system is completely programmable through Labwindows and has an extra long helium hold time (15 days) to permit long duration studies. It has interchangeable He⁴ and He³ inserts that provide a temperature range of 280mK to 400K.

· Cryogen free 2.5K/2T system consisting of a Cyromech pulsed-tube closed-cycle refrigerator (with a temperature range of 2.5K to 300K) installed in the bore of a GMW 3473 water-cooled electromagnet (with 3” and 6” polefaces, adjustable gap, and fields up to 2T).

· Other dewar stations with smaller magnets (up to 5 Tesla), two SQUID susceptometers, and a 40K closed-cycle helium refrigerator.

Electronics:

• Pulsed-current apparatus consists of transconductance amplifiers (compliance voltages up to 400 V, currents up to 500 A), high-speed high-CMRR differential amplifiers, and visual-C waveform analysis tools. The performance of this pulsed system greatly exceeds any commercially available apparatus. The best rise times are presently below 100 ns. The data is collected on digital storage oscilloscopes -- we have a LeCroy LT322 (500 MHz, 2-channel) and a LeCroy 7314 (400 Mhz, 4-channel) DSO’s plus other smaller scopes.
• Other electronic instrumentation consists of the usual complement of lock-in amplifiers, preamplifiers, DMMs, nanovoltmeters, arbitrary waveform/ function generators, etc.

Sample preparation and characterization:

• Contact and projection photolithography and optical sample inspection is done with Olympus BHM and Olympus BX40 metallurgical microscopes. The latter instrument has UV capable 1.25X—150X objectives, polarization, bright-field/dark-field, and DIC capabilities, and has a high-resolution digital camera. Optical resolution (imaging and lithography) is ~ 0.3 mm.
• Electron-beam lithography is done with a Nabity NPGS system (40 nm resolution).
• Multimode cryopumped vacuum deposition system with e-beam evaporation, r.f. and d.c. sputter sources. D.C. biased substrate holder with LN₂ cooling and heating up to 800^o C. UHV thermal-evaporation deposition system. Furnaces for oxygen annealing. Darkrooms, electrodeposition, fume hoods, micro-balance, and dry boxes.
• Materials characterization and analysis facilities include a 0.14-nm-resolution scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) with x-ray microanalysis, a 0.2-nm resolution TEM, an SEM, TopoMetrix AFM/STM scanning probe microscope, a Nanoscope 1 STM, x-ray diffractometers, and EPR.

Machine shop and electronics instrumentation shop:

· Standard modern machine-shop and electronics-shop facilities for design and construction of laboratory apparatus.