A pEek on the lab

czech metrology institute (Czech Republic)

Contacts: Miroslav VALTR, mvaltr@cmi.cz

Web-site: http://www.nanometrologie.cz/en/

LAB and RESEARCH

CZECH METROLOGY INSTITUTE

The Czech Metrology Institute (CMI) is the National Metrology Institute of the Czech Republic. CMI provides uniformity and precision of measuring instruments and measurement in all the fields of research, technical and economic activities in the range of Law about metrology. The institute provides services in all basic fields of metrology:

• fundamental metrology - maintenance and development of national standards, research and development in metrology,

• transfer of units - calibration of standards and measuring instruments,

• legal metrology - type approvals of legal metrology instruments, initial and subsequent verification of measuring instruments, metrological supervision, conformity assessment in metrology.

Since 1998, the Department of Nanometrology has focused on the development of scanning probe microscopy metrology and related methods. This includes providing traceability for scanning probe microscopy methods (metrology SPM), developing methods for quantitative analysis of different physical quantities with nanometre resolution and numerical analysis. The main effort of the Department is equally distributed between scientific projects, instrumentation development and publication activities.

EXPERIMENTAL EQUIPMENT

METROLOGY SCANNING PROBE MICROSCOPE

Metrology SPM is based on Physik Instrumente XYZ stage and a frequency stabilized Nd:YAG laser six-axis interferometer built in cooperation with the Institute of Scientific Instruments, CAS. The system can be used for measurements up to 200 x 200 x 20 microns. AFM head is based on simple optical lever feedback, using home-built controller based on Red Pitaya board.

VACUUM DUAL PROBE SCANNING THERMAL MICROSCOPE

This dual probe SThM setup operating under vacuum conditions was built to address measurements of thermal diffusivity using two microscale thermal probes placed at mutual distance between 1 to 60 μm, monitoring propagation of heat pulses from one probe to another one through the studied sample.

BRUKER DIMENSION ICON

This commercial SPM system can be used for routine measurements of many different physical properties. Scanning range is 80 x 80 x 10 microns. The most common operating modes are AFM (surface topography), SThM (thermal conductivity), MFM (magnetic properties) or PeakForce QNM (nanoscale mechanical characterization).

PEOPLE

PETR KLAPETEK

Petr Klapetek is head of Department of Nanometrology. He is working in the field of quantitative scanning probe microscopy (SPM) since 1999, including atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM), scanning thermal microscopy (SThM) and other similar methods. He is one of the founders of open source software initiative for SPM data analysis Gwyddion (http://gwyddion.net) and the author of open source FDTD solver Gsvit (http://gsvit.net). He designed and constructed several specialized metrology systems for scanning probe microscopy (e.g. national standard for nanometrology) and is an author of >140 publications in the field of SPM, mechanical and optical measurements.

Miroslav Valtr

Miroslav Valtr received Ph.D. in physics in 2010 from Masaryk University in Brno. He is a permanent member of staff at CMI since 2007. He is focused on SPM measurements and SPM data processing. He is also participating on instrumentation development and electronics design and administrates supercomputing facilities at CMI.

Anna CHARVATOVA CAMPBELL

Anna Charvátová Campbell is working in the field of nanometrology since 2007 including instrumented indentation testing and atomic force microscopy. Her main interest is data processing and uncertainty analysis with focus on function fitting using errors-in-variables models, e.g. OEFPIL.

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