Microscopy Laboratory

This lab has two instruments. One is a Quanta 200 scanning electron microscope from Thermo Scientific. It is an electron microscope equipped with a field emission gun electron source (FEG), which can be used to analyze morphology of samples using its several electron sensors and their local atomic composition thanks to its energy dispersive X-ray detector (EDS). The second one is a Bruker Anasys nanoIR3-s, AFM/NanoIR integrated system for spectroscopic measurement at AFM high spatial resolution. This system is based on a new generation multifunctional platform optimized to integrate high resolution localized infra-red (IR) spectroscopy and high-resolution atomic force microscopy (AFM) imaging. It combines scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) with nanometer-scale IR spectroscopy (AFM-IR) and with an atomic force microscope (AFM).
It provides IR spectroscopy information at nanoscale, chemical imaging, and mapping of optical properties at high spatial resolution. It is moreover possible to perform AFM topographic imaging and mapping of material properties, making it a very versatile tool with plenty of opportunity of exploitation in material science.