The Advanced Microscopy Facility

Welcome to the Advanced Microscopy Facility (AMF), an open user facility located in the Bob Wright Centre at the University of Victoria in beautiful British Columbia.

Several quick links are available with the icons below, but for more complete information use the navigation links at the top and left side of the page.

Below is a simple example of our capabilities: the second prototype of a dislocation grated aperture for making vortex electron beams in a scanning electron microscope, fabricated with our FIB-2100 FIB, imaged with our S-4800 SEM. Sample is a 100 nm thick SiN window in a SiN TEM grid, coated both sides with 20 nm of Au-Pd on our Anatech Hummer VI sputter coater.

Image of interest - prototype number two of a dislocation grated aperture fabricated with FB-2100 FIB. FIB work and SEM image by Adam Schuetze

Dislocation grated aperture fabricated on our Hitachi FB-2100 focused ion beam system and imaged on our Hitachi S-4800 SEM. FIB work and SEM image by Adam Schuetze. See more images in this series in our gallery.

Can you guess what these are?

SEM images Courtesy of Dr. Elaine Humphrey

Answers

Click the tabs to check your answers.

Left

Pollen grains have unique structures which allow you to identify the species they belong to. If you said lilly pollen, then you were correct!

Center

Did you guess zoea larva? This is the larva (called a zoea - pronounced zo-ee-a) of a true crab, found in the plankton of English Bay near Vancouver.

Right

Isn't it pretty. It's an ant's anus!

AMF news and events

January 24th, 2012 - The FIB has been repaired and is ready for service. You may now book your sessions.

For FIB users needing an easy way to locate a fabrication point on a gold coated glass slide at a later time, either when switching the sample to the SEM, or back into the FIB, we now have an Excel spreadsheet that will help. See the downloads section for the FB-2100 FIB in the instruments section.

When booking the FIB, please book time at the beginning or the end of the day. Please avoid booking sessions in the middle of the day, as this breaks up the usable time on the instrument.

The next SEM workshop is February 15th, 2012. Sign up with our online web form, in person, or by email.

The next FIB workshop is February 22nd, 2012. Sign up with our online web form, in person, or by email.

For FIB users cutting features in SiN windows, we now have an Excel spreadsheet for computing the center coordinates of an arbitrarily rotated square. See the downloads section for the FB-2100 FIB in the instruments section.

For FIB users cutting patterns on gold coated glass slides, we now have an Excel spreadsheet for automatically computing focus values, as a function of position. See the downloads section for the FB-2100 FIB in the instruments section.

Read about the Advanced Microscopy Facility in The Ring, the University of Victoria community newspaper.

Read about the Advanced Microscopy Facility in the National Post article published on May 28, 2011.