First Spectra: Commissioning an IPES System in Florence This spring took us to the Università degli Studi di Firenze (University of Florence),…

First Spectra: Commissioning an IPES System in Florence

This spring took us to the Università degli Studi di Firenze (University of Florence), where we commissioned a new Inverse Photoemission Spectroscopy (IPES) setup — electron source, sample, and detector aligned and ready to probe the unoccupied electronic states of the customer’s samples.

After alignment and calibration, we recorded the first spectra directly on-site — organic semiconductor samples, and the system delivered clean, usable data right away.

A System Built to Grow

The visit also gave us the chance to see something we don’t get to see often enough: how a system evolves after it leaves our workshop. Our customer at the university had, over the past year, integrated a Radial Distribution Chamber (RDC) from OmniVac into their setup — linking together a whole range of analysis and preparation chambers around it.

The result is a setup with significantly more experimental flexibility — samples can move between preparation and analysis stations without breaking vacuum, opening up combinations of techniques that would otherwise mean separate systems entirely.

It’s exactly this kind of growth — a system that keeps adapting to new experiments years after installation — that we build our components for. Seeing it working this well in Florence was great to see.