There are eight Central Facilities to support the NCMN's mission: Crystallography, Electron Microscopy, Materials Preparation, Metallurgical and Mechanical Characterization, Scanning Probe Microscopy, X-Ray Materials Characterization, Nanofabrication, and Cryogenics. These facilities are available to all UNL faculty as well as companies in Nebraska and elsewhere. The purpose of these pages are to serve as a guide to the capabilities and equipment available in each facility. Facility supervisors and specialists phone numbers and emails are listed to answer additional questions. (see locations)
Crystallography
Services provided include unit cell determinations, complete structure determinations, and collection of single crystal data for users to solve and refine themselves.
Electron Microscopy
The scope of the facility is materials characterization of the topography, morphology, elemental composition, crystalline microstructure, crystal defects, and atomic arrangements of materials, largely on a scale from 10 micrometers down to the near-atomic level.
Mat. Preparation
Two sputtering systems have been established to fabricate a variety of thin films, especially the nanostructured films including overlayers, multilayers, granular solids, clusters, etc. Two tube furnaces are available for sample (or target) annealing, doping, and sintering.
Metall. and Mechan. Characterization
This facility contains a large variety of equipment to characterize the mechanical and physical properties of a wide range of materials. The facility focuses on using the many materials characterization aspects to perform failure analyses on components.
Scanning Probe Microscopy
Digital Instruments Nanoscope IIIa Dimension 3100 Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) Facility provides nanometer-scale characterization of materials by using STM, AFM, and MFM.
X-Ray Characterization
The NCMN X-Ray Characterization Facility is dedicated to materials identification and characterization through non-destructive, X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and/or X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) techniques.
Nanofabrication
The NCMN facility contains a large variety of equipment to prepare, fabricate, analysis, and characterize a wide range of nanostructure materials.
Cryogenics
Cryogenics provides the means for obtaining Liquid Nitrogen and Liquid Helium for low temperature research, cold traps, etc.
