Lab Tour Three

Third and final page!

	This is a tri-arc furnace. This is used for Czochralski method single crystal growth. This is essentially 3 arc welders built into one. Previously the thermoelectrics group had been concentrating on high melting intermetallic compounds, and this provided a means of growing single crystals of them.
	This is a vertical Stockbarger furnace. It is used to grow large single crystals of congruently melting compounds. When doing properties measurements, it is usually better to do them on single crystals and this is how they can be grown.
	This is one of our Silicon Carbide furnaces at work. We have two of these in the lab and they are useful for higher temperature reactions (upwards of 1500°C) where a flowing gas is desired (typically N₂, or a N₂/H₂ mix). As pictured the furnace is around 1200°C, hence the thermal radiation from the tube.
	Same SiC furnace as above, with the lights on this time.
	This is a second bank of box furnaces, as found in one of our basement labs.
	This is a high pressure crystal growing furnace. It is designed to work at pressures up to 100 atm and temperatures up to 4000 C. Nitride project members have modified it for growing single crystals of gallium nitride.
	This is a Bruker SMART 1000 CCD Single Crystal Diffractometer. While the powder diffractometer allows us to look at powdered samples, crystal structures are normally solved with this machine. In the case of a very good crystal, data can be collected and the structure can be solved in under 12 hours (compare this to protein crystallography where it can take months or even years to solve a structure). This is not actually found in our lab but is in the joint X-ray facility in the department. Primarily used by the nitride and thermoelectric project, DiSalvo group members typically get full training on the instrument and are some of the few that are allowed full access for working with it (hence why it is displayed here!) That is it for the lab tour, hope you enjoyed it! We are currently in a phase of expansion and getting new instrumentation all the time, so check back every now and again to see what is new!

Last updated July 2007