Thursday, March 29, 2018

E-beam evaporators - recommendations?

Condensed matter experimentalists often need to prepare nanoscale thickness films of a variety of materials.  One approach is to use "physical vapor deposition" - in a good vacuum, a material of interest is heated to the point where it has some nonzero vapor pressure, and that vapor collides with a substrate of interest and sticks, building up the film.  One way to heat source material is with a high voltage electron beam, the kind of thing that used to be used at lower intensities to excite the phosphors on old-style cathode ray tube displays.  

My Edwards Auto306 4-pocket e-beam system is really starting to show its age.  It's been a great workhorse for quick things that don't require the cleanroom.  Does anyone out there have recommendations for a system (as inexpensive as possible of course) with similar capabilities, or a vendor you like for such things?  

3 comments:

  1. https://www.leybold.com/univex/#!index.php

    Worth every dime.

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  2. Thanks, Amit. Leybold does make nice gadgets. Out of curiosity, how many dimes are we talking about? :-)

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  3. I got the predecessor to this about a decade ago:
    http://www.mbraun.com/products/coating-equipment/vacuum-deposition/mb-ecovap
    The software was problematic, the hardware was fine, and it was about 20% less than a Lesker system at the time. Mine was a beta version, and presumably the software issues are better.

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