Facilities

Without electron microscopes, nanotechnology research would be impossible. They allow researchers to look inside their materials at the scale of atoms and molecules. Both the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and the Transition Electron Microscope (TEM) at Victoria University were purchased with the first round of MacDiarmid funding in 2003.

You won’t find anything quite like this anywhere else in the world, partly because Andreas Markwitz and his team at Geological and Nuclear Sciences built it themselves. They took an old electron beam annealer, originally a donation from Cambridge University in the UK, turned it on its side and ‘flanched it onto the backside’ of a high vacuum chamber. The result, as Andreas proclaims, is “phenomenal!”

Whereas the GREAT60s are like bread and butter for Paul Callaghan’s Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Group the Hyperpolarisation Instrument is an exotic step into the dark. It’s a highly specialised instrument that uses a technique called ‘spin exchange hyperpolarisation’ to do NMR on gases, which is usually extremely difficult due to their low density.

Shine a high energy beam of radiation at a luminescent material and its electrons are thrust into an excited state. As they fall back to their ground state they emit light of a range of energies, the spectrum of energies being a fundamental characteristic or fingerprint of the material.The luminescence spectrometer is used to measure this light. 

Optical tweezers do exactly as their name suggests. They use light beams to pick tiny objects up and move them around. They give you such a direct appreciation for the forces working in the microscopic world that you feel like you’ve eaten a ‘shrink-me’ pill and popped in there yourself! As Massey physicist, Bill Williams says, “It’s like you’re using the Force on Star Wars!”

The SQUID magnetometer, bought in the first round of MacDiarmid capital funding, has been a very expensive workhorse in the lab at IRL for six years. To keep it running at the low temperatures required it has cost them $6,000 a week to fill with liquid helium. Over six years they have spent nearly three quarters of a million dollars.

Like the new Small Angle X-Ray Scattering Instrument the Spider Diffractometer fires beams of X-rays at samples to reveal their crystal structure. There are three conventional X-ray diffractometers in New Zealand but this instrument offers a new level of resolution. It has become a second port of call for researchers all over the country and overseas. It also acts as a bridge to the Australian National Synchrotron, an even more powerful X-Ray analysis tool, which all New Zealand researchers have access to.

When you fire a beam of X-rays at a material, the angles and intensity at which they bounce back reveal information about the structure of atoms and molecules within it. X-ray analysis is a key tool for materials scientists. The Small Angle X-Ray Scattering (SAXS) instrument is one of two new X-ray analysis systems purchased in this round of MacDiarmid funding. Along with the Rigaku Spider X-ray Diffractometer it fills an important gap in national capability.

Many of the light sensitive materials used in devices such as LED’s and solar cells can completely change their molecular structure when exposed to light. The atoms rearrange into an ‘excited state’. Understanding the structure and electronic properties of this excited state is the key to improving the optical properties of these materials. The Time Resolved Raman Experiment is the only set up in the country which allows you to directly measure the vibrational spectrum of the excited state – information that can unlock the key to the structure.

Ben Ruck and his team are using their new UHV facilities at Victoria University to develop Rare Earth Nitride materials, which show great potential for spintronics applications (electronic devices which make use of the spin as well as the charge of electrons).