My Lab

To organize my blogs more efficiently I have decided to introduce the concept of "My Lab". This will be sort of my online lab where I will discuss experiments I have done. Well I am not rich enough to buy expensive equipments like Tektronix signal generator, Agilent picoammeter, capacitance meter etc. Whenever I need to perform experiments I borrow this instruments from some of Prof. of my department or other, get my work done and then return it back so you can call it sort of my virtual lab.

Introduction to my lab-
In my lab I have manly experimental setup dealing with condens matter physics experiments. But depeneding upon my interest you can also find experiments related to other brach of physics. At now I have experimental setup for measuring IV characteristics, temperature depenedent measurment, magnetic field dependent measurments, time depenedent experiments , capacitance measurments and soon I will also introduce some fabrication related facilitites in my lab like making ohmic and schottky contacts in GaN. n and p type doping of GaN, Chemical Vapor deposition technique etc.

The major instruments in my labs are-
1) Agilent Picoammeter- It can measure current in the rang of pico ampere, it also has a voltage source prob so we can use it as voltage source also.
2)Agilen Nanovoltmeter
3)Crystate- It is a device used to set temperature. Using this I can go down to 80K temperature. Liquid nitrogen is used for cooling.
4)Acton Monocromator.
5)White Light source.
6)Tektronix Signal generator AFG3101
7)Tektronix Oscilloscope TDS 1012B
8)Lock in amplifier and chopper.
9)An electromagnet with its power supply. It can produce maximum of 1.5 Tesla of magnetic field.
10)Capacitance-voltage measurments (CV measurments )
Beside this some other things are polarizers, lenses, optical banch, Laser, some chemicals, anneling setup, photodiodes, soldering ions etc.

This was the hareware part in my lab. Now comes the software part. Inorder to completly automize you experimental setup you neet to interface this instruments with compter, detail of this I will discuss in different post. For this you should be very good in C++ programing. You can also use some softwares available to ease your work of interfacing and cotrolling instruments.
The main softwares available in my labs are-
1)MATLAB
2)LabView
3)Origin 8.0

beside this vendors like tektronix also ship softwares to contrlle there instrumetns.

Now what I actually do in my lab is I fabricate different samples and find there electrical charateristics, which include IV charateristics, capacitance measurments etc

Finally this are the list of experiments I can perform in my lab
1)IV characteristics.
2) Temperature dependent IV charateristics
3)Magnetic field depenedent IV characteristics.
4)Time dependent characteristics.
5)Capacitance measurments.
6)DLTS - Deep Level Transient Spectroscopy.

I will discuss each of this in later posts.

enjoy
Prashant Patil