Chair for Multicomponent Materials

Research and development of magnetron based gas aggregation sources (GAS)

The magnetron based gas aggregation source (GAS) is now one of the working horses in our group. It can be used to produce metal and polymer nanoparticles for different applications in the research fields of our group:

But the group does not only use the GAS for the production of nanoparticles for various applications, the GAS itself is also an interesting research field by itself. We are trying to improve the understanding of the cluster formation inside the vapor phase with several in-situ diagnostic methods, like UV-Vis spectroscopy and in-situ laser light scattering. In cooperation with the Charles University Prague we also use small angle x-ray scattering for these investigations at the P03 beamline of PETRA 3 operated by Stephan Roth at DESY.

We also use our experience in this field to produce our own cluster sources and develop them further. Especially the finding of Dr. Alexander Vahl that the composition of alloy nanoparticles can be varied in-situ in the GAS if one varies the pressure and uses a special target geometry is only one of the interesting observation we made over the years.

  • Getting a deeper understanding of the growth process of nanoparticles inside the GAS
  • Further development of the in-situ composition tuning
  • Combination of the GAS with other thin film fabrication techniques in our group
  • Fabrication of new nanoparticle based devices ,e.g. sensors, memristors, solar cells

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Fig. 1 Schematic setup of the GAS aggregation source.