Device name:  Combinatorial laser molecular beam epitaxy system integrated with specialized low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (Combi Laser MBE-STM)
Function: This facility aims at accelerating the materials research in a highly efficient way by advanced high-throughput film synthesis techniques and subsequent fast characterization of surface morphology and electronic states.
Features: The Combi Laser MBE-STM system is built by our group and Prof. Huan’s group. We firstly propose the involved key technologies, and all the core components are independently developed. Compared with commercial equipment, this system has many advantages such as 1) a rotatable circular mask is introduced to avoid the accumulative error, which improves the accuracy of film composition; 2) the scanner head of STM is equipped with a large XY coarse motion range (>10mm*10mm), whose positioning resolution is better than 1 μm; 3) the specially designed transfer mechanism can realize not only efficient transfer of the sample/ tip/ target, but also function expansion in future.
During the four years of development, we have repeatedly optimized the system, and achieved a comprehensive performance testing. We successfully synthesize high-quality superconducting FeSe thin films with gradient thickness, and image surfaces of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG), Au (111), Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ (BSCCO), and FeSe. In addition, the superconducting energy gap of BSCCO is obtained.