The Coal Chamber is the newest addition to the Surface Dynamics Lab. It combines STM with a high mass range quadrupole mass spectrometer. Through a combination of a turbomolecular, ion and titanium sublimation pump and base pressure of 5x10-10 mbar is achieved. The chamber is equipped with an ion sputter gun for cleaning single crystals and can be fitted with rear view LEED optics. Samples can be cooled with liquid nitrogen and heated to >1300 K.
The chamber houses an Aarhus scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), modified to allow in-situ atom beam dosing and the ability to shine light into the tunneling junction during scanning. This has been used to study the hydrogen functionalization of e.g. graphene on metal and insulating surfaces with the aim of engineering a bandgap in graphene.An ion pulse counting quadrupole mass spectrometer with a mass range of 1-500 amu (Hiden EPIC) is used for temperature programmed desorption measurements.
The Coal Chamber is also equipped with a Knudsen cell type molecular evaporator for dosing various molecules, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (coronene, pyrene etc.), C60 etc. Various ports around the chamber allow the mounting of atomic hydrogen and oxygen beam sources, as well as a metal evaporator that can also be used to deposit small carbon clusters.
