A new deposition system has been developed and installed that combines MBE growth of high spin-orbit coupling III-V semiconductors, such as InAs or InSb, with superconducting metals, such as Al and Nb, to engineer hybrid materials capable of hosting Majorana fermions. This chamber was installed in 2016, and was producing record breaking material within its first four months of operation.
The MBE chamber is loaded with arsenic and antimony in valved cracking sources. It also has two indium cells, one gallium cell, one aluminum cell, one silicon doping cell, and a light source which enables absorption and reflection spectrometry which takes advantage of the temperature dependent optical absorption edge native to semiconductor materials.
Additional chambers for superconductor deposition by thermal evaporation, electron beam evaporation and sputtering allow deposition of a wide variety of materials including Al, Fe, Au, Ni, Ge, Ti, V, Nb and NbTiN.
In addition, new dedicated surface metrology tools, including a Bruker atomic force microscope and an Olympus laser confocal microscope, were recently installed.