LINES OF RESEARCH

The FEMAN Group has large experience on the production and characterization of sub-crystalline and amorphous materials in thin films, in nanometric powders and nanostructured layers, as well as on deposition techniques under vacuum, such as plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD), DC and RF magnetron sputtering, and techniques based on ion beams, such as processing by ionic bombardment and sputtering assisted by ion beam.

The most studied nanostuctured materials by the Group are silicon, carbon and diamond-like-carbon, and binary compounds (silicon carbide, silicon nitride and oxinitride, boron nitride and the alloys of carbon-nitrogen) and ternary compounds like boron-carbon-nitrogen. Diverse transition metals oxides have also been studied (W, Ta, Ni, V, Mo) for possible applications in sensors and to electrochromism. Recently, diverse studies on nanoscale multilayer systems have been carried out in order to study their structural and physical properties.

Among the characterization techniques more commonly used by the Group, are those for structure and composition, such as TEM, SEM, HRTEM, SIMS, XPS, XRD, FTIR, Raman, PL, EA, SAED and AFM, and diverse characterization techniques, such as electrical conductivity measurement and Hall effect, impedance spectroscopy, ionic conductivity measurement, chronoamperometry and voltametry. The Group is well known by its large expertise on the instrumentation and applications of optical characterization techniques, in particular for polarimetric techniques, such as UV-VIS ellipsometry, FTIR ellipsometry and MIE scattering ellipsometry. The activities of the Group in the field of nanostructured materials extend also toward the diagnosis of low temperature plasmas for material deposition, by the means of Langmuir probes, quadrupolar mass spectrometry and optical emission.

Nowadays, the general objectives in research of FEMAN Group belong to three main research lines: Graphene, Nanomaterials and Polarimetry.