This distributed ICTS consists of four infrastructures:
National Centre for Electron Microscopy in Madrid
The National Centre for Electron Microscopy houses a wide range of transmission, scanning, microwave and force microscopy equipment and features state-of-the-art microscopes equipped with aberration correctors. It also houses two highly sophisticated microscopes that make the centre particularly unique: a probe-corrected ARM 200cFEG microscope equipped with latest-generation analytical techniques and a second image-corrected ARM300cFEG microscope (resolution 0.05nm). These two instruments are complemented by advanced scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) and a suite of SEM/TEM (Transmission Electron Microscopy) equipment that provide complete characterisation at structural and compositional levels for studies prior to sub-Angstrom characterisation.
Advanced Microscope Laboratory in Zaragoza
This laboratory aims to provide the scientific and industrial communities with state-of-the-art equipment in local probe microscopy and electron microscopy for the observation, characterisation, nanofabrication and manipulation of materials at the atomic and molecular scale. It also contains other critical laboratories for characterisation, processing and manipulation at the nano-scale, including a clean room (photolithography), double-beam techniques for sample preparation and other characterisation methods based on photoelectron spectroscopy.
Electron Microscopy Division of the University of Cádiz
The Electron Microscopy Division offers a wide range of state-of-the-art microscopy equipment and support techniques, including the FEI Titan Themis 60-300 Ultra High-Resolution microscope. This is the only doubly corrected microscope (in probe and objective) in Spain, making it possible to conduct simultaneous analytical and structural studies on the same sample with sub-angstrom resolutions.
Unit of Electronic Microscopy Applied to Materials of the University of Barcelona
The Unit of Electronic Microscopy Applied to Materials features cryomicroscopy equipment for the characterisation of beam-sensitive materials, such as biological samples, in situ electrical measurements for structural characterisation by precession electron diffraction and microprobe analysis for the characterisation of minerals of complex composition, as well as STEM microscopy.
The unit offers advanced methods and techniques in transmission and scanning electron microscopy for the structural analysis of materials, sample preparation and image and data processing by computational methods, enabling the characterisation of inorganic and organic complex materials with applications in biomedicine, catalysis, intelligent materials, transport, energy and communications.
