The Center for Nanomagnetic Systems at the University of Houston has extensive research facilities with more than 10,000 sq.ft. of laboratory space equipped with processing and analytical equipment of at least $4,000,000 replacement value. Nanofabrication facility, magnetic materials synthesis and characterization laboratory, recording systems characterization laboratory, and a surface science laboratory are available to support the program.
- AJA Ultra-high vacuum sputter deposition system with six magnetron sources in a co-sputtering configuration, 850C substrate temperature, RF/DC substrate bias for combinatorial materials studies and high quality multilayer deposition
- Electrochemical deposition system based on 273 Potentiostat/Galvanostat from Princeton Applied Research and a Flat Cell
- Electrochemical deposition system based on Gamry PC4 Potentiostat/Galvanostat
- Custom built high deposition rate sputter coating system
- Custom built e-beam evaporator with Advanced Energy Kaufman Ion Source for ion-assisted deposition capabilities
- J.C. Nabity Electron-Beam Lithography System
- Ion/Atom Beam Lithography printing tool, including a vacuum exposure station, duoplasmatron ion/atom source, power supplies, and instrumentation
- Ion-mill/Ion-beam deposition chamber
- Magnetically enhanced RIE system
- Spin-coating system
- Leo 1525 Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM)
- Perkin-Elmer 1600 Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR)
- Alpha-step surface profilometer
- LakeShore Vibrating Sample Magnetometer (VSM) with 2.4Tesla field capability (donated by Seagate Technology)
- LakeShore based magnetotransport measurement system
- Polar Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect (MOKE) Magnetometer with 2.9 Tesla field capability and sub-micron X-Y substrate scanning stage
- Helmholtz Coils Longitudinal Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect (MOKE) Magnetometer with 50mT field capability with 200ppm field uniformity over ~30mm diameter volume
- Veeco Dimension 3000 Scanning Probe Microscope with phase box capable of AFM/MFM measurements
- Quasi-static Magnetic Recording Test System with 0.1nm lateral resolution for recording head movement
- Amperes boundary element solver by Integration Engineering Software
- LLG Micromagnetics solver
- OOMMF by NIST
- Custom m olecular modeling (e.g., MM2 force field, semi-empirical, and DFT)
- MagFEM
- FEM thermal solver from Ansys
- MATLAB custom built routines for playback evaluation