28 Feb 2023
According to the Grant Agreement, in the lifetime of NFFA-Europe Pilot the Transnational Access offer must enlarge to meet (i) the qualitative needs of users that could be better met with new specialized providers, or (ii) quantitative needs resulting in oversubscription of the current capacity. To this aim, two calls for additional access providers were foreseen at M24 and M40, respectively. This report describes the rationale that led to the text of the first call for additional access providers, i.e. from the evaluation of the needs – mainly based on the analysis provided in the deliverable D2.3 “First balance of access provision” - to the search for alternative solutions to widen and strengthen the current offer.28 Feb 2023
During the second year of the NEP project, the development and extension of a Four-Wave-Mixing (FWM) technique, called Transient Grating (TG), has been continued and finalized. The deliverable has been postponed due to a huge problem with the main laser that was stopped for a very long period. The requirement to short pulse length didn’t allow the use of a different laser currently available in our lab. The main scope of this deliverable is the development of a FWM setup (in detail, TG), based on short pulse duration and covering an extended wave vector region, allowing to probe various dynamical ranges, not reachable by already existing schemes. The new setup was installed at SPRINT lab of the Istituto Officina dei Materiali (IOM) of Consiglio Nazionale dellle Ricerche (CNR) in Trieste. The TG approach is mainly devoted to the excitation and detection of optical and acoustic phonons in materials. In the first case, a very short pulse duration is required, in order to follow the typical high frequencies of optical phonons (THz range). In the second case, the possibility of varying the induced wave-vector in the sample allows to measure the dispersion of acoustic phonons, and so the speed of sound extraction. The explored wave-vector region in standard laser-based TG setup is limited by the use of special optics, which cannot allow for large angles between pump pulses. The same optics fix a finite number of selected wave-vectors, not variable in a continuous way. Moreover, the use of very long pulses (hundreds of fs) in TG devoted to acoustic phonons, doesn’t allow to measure contemporary the optical ones. Here we propose a new setup for measuring both optical and acoustic phonons, with a continuous variation of the induced wave-vector, which is also extended above any previous setup. The system has been tested on various samples, and the measured frequencies have been compared with the literature. In detail, we report the analysis on optical phonons on alfa-quartz and optical and acoustic phonons on a glass slab, covering a wave-vector region up to 10 um-1.28 Feb 2023
The Joint Activity JA3 (WP13) is aiming at development of methods of high-resolution lithography and pattern transfer by collaborative efforts of all four participants of the WP. Among the goals of the JA3 one can mention extended applicability of the tools offered in TA and new functionalities in lithographic and patterning techniques to be available among the TA providers. Both “top-down” and “bottom-up” lithographic approaches that include high-resolution optical Talbot displacement lithography, thermal scanning probe lithography, He+ ion beams and block copolymers are being used within the JA. Those lithographic methods are combined with high-resolution patterning, such as reactive ion etching and atomic layer etching. We focus our activity to provide relevant packages of nano-engineering methods combined with optimum protocols and know-how. The results generated within the current JA will be used in other work packages, such as WP14 and WP 15.
