The lab is equipped with: (1) Two dicing saws for precisely and delicately cutting relatively thin wafers and plates into distinct pieces; (2) Two diamond-wire saws for cutting/slicing crystal boules of Si and Ge up to 8 inches in diameter and length. The diamond-wire saw cuts crystals gently with low strains/damages and minimal loss of valuable material; (3) A fast Blanchard surface grinder.

This lab is equipped with (1) two high-precision surface grinders, (2) a rotary diamond blade saw for cutting large crystal boules, (3) a hole drilling machine, (4) lapping machines, and many other machining equipment.

This facility is used to etch crystals using wet chemical methods (mainly HF and HNO3) to remove surface layers that have stresses/strains/damages induced by machining processes.

This versatile overarm polisher can be outfitted with various plates and pads to perform intermediate and fine polishing steps using diamond or colloidal silica slurries.

•    A novel homemade automated machine for polishing channel-cut crystals, Channel-Cut High Resolution Polisher (C-CHiRP).

This new homemade instrument can be used for machine-polishing channel-cut crystal surfaces or other special-shaped crystal surfaces that do not have top flat surfaces (so that normal polishers cannot polish them). It can achieve strain-free channel-cut walls with roughness also toward 1Å.

This laboratory is equipped with three main instruments:

1. Two-axis Rigaku diffractometer (with Cu or Mo x-ray tube) for precisely orienting single crystals along required lattice planes with precision ≤0.05°.
2. Back-reflection Laue camera (with Cu or Mo x-ray tube) for identification/verification of crystal orientations, equipped with the LauePt simulation software for studying the orientations of any single crystals with high precision up to 0.1°.
3. Topo Unit, consisting of 18kW rotating-anode X-ray generator and a double-crystal diffractometer, can measure high-resolution (strain sensitivity better than 10-6), double-crystal rocking curves of silicon, germanium, diamond, etc. Can take topography images with a CCD detector on each point of the rocking curve (Rocking Curve Imaging). The X-ray beam size can be up to four inches in diameter, allowing to reveal macroscopic strains of large crystals (including X-ray monochromators mounted on fixtures).

Advanced X-ray characterization of crystal optics is carried out at the 1-BM Optics and Detectors Test Beamline.

R&D in crystal optics is carried out either independently, or jointly with the APS beamline scientists and user community, or in collaboration with other facilities to keep the group at the state-of-the art in x-ray optics. Examples include designing and development of high-to ultrahigh- resolution crystal monochromators and analyzers (from sub-10 meV to sub-meV) for IXS/RIXS, strain-free crystal polishing with roughness toward 1A, automated machine polishing of channel-cut crystals, quartz-based X-ray optics, diamond optics, SiC optics, etc.