Molecular Materials Design, Department of Applied Chemistry, School of Engineering, Tohoku University

PLD-grown films with different compositions and structures can be integrated on a single substrate in one experiment, and the confocal laser scanning microscope which is directly attached to the PLD allows direct observation of local surface areas on the sample without being exposed to air, which maximum temperature in observation is as high as 1800℃.

PLD-grown films can be electrochemically characterized by in situ approach in vacuum with ionic liquid used as electrolyte.

A revolver type sample holder unit enables to set multiple samples in the vacuum chamber and to successively deposit soft materials on each substrate in one run experiment. In the deposition and substrate heating, IR lasers are used, respectively. The precision control of the substrate temperature is possible around at 100-300 ℃ within the error of ±0.1℃ by directly attaching a thermocouple to the sample, combined with the IR laser heating device.

Two different soft materials can be simultaneously deposited by using two independent IR lasers. In situ optical scale observation of the growth process is available through a long-distance focusing optical microscope.

Rapid laser scan enables to ablate two different target materials with almost no time delay between the ablations, and to deposit, e.g., compositionally-graded films according to a computer-programmed laser pulse sequence of the two target materials during deposition.