Shared Facilities at IMRI

Established in 2015, Irvine Materials Research Institute (IMRI) is a 20,000 ft2 facility that serves as UCI’s cross-campus materials research characterization nexus. UCI has invested substantially in the last 5 years to establish a premier Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) facility, now fully functional. IMRI operates a wide range of state-of-the-art, open-access user facilities for characterizing inorganic, organic, and biological materials from the sub-angstrom to macroscopic length scales. The UCI MRSEC will be integrated with these shared facilities, for which MRSEC faculty provide scientific and managerial leadership. The PI, Xiaoqing Pan, is IMRI’s inaugural director, and MRSEC faculty, Huolin Xin, William Bowman, and Joe Patterson, are members of IMRI’s Faculty Advisory Board. Many MRSEC faculty are core users of these facilities. The University supports the salary of the administrative staff and the 6 PhD level core technical staff. Synergies between the MRSEC and the IMRI facility will ensure that strategic investments in core facilities are mutually beneficial. IMRI’s state-of-the-art instruments will be integrated into the Center’s REU and other educational programs. IMRI houses four complementary materials characterization facilities, which are open to campus, national, and international users including other universities and industries.

  • The Center for Transmission Electron Microscopy

    Established in 2015 and in full operation in 2018, is a 7,000 ft2 microscopy facility. It features four TEMs (the Nion UltraSTEM 200 equipped with high-energy resolution monochromated EELS system (HERMES), the double spherical aberration-corrected JEOL Grand ARM300CF, the JEOL 2100F cryoTEM with a Gatan K3 direction electron  detection camera, and the JEOL 2800 high-throughput TEM with high-efficiency dual x-ray detectors), and a dual-beam Focused Ion Beam (FIB) system (GAIA-3 GMH). IMRI also houses a full sample preparation laboratory for hard, soft, or biological specimens; a variety of in situ TEM holders; and computing and data storage facilities connected to 10G network through an optical fiber system. IMRI features the world’s two most powerful microscopes for materials characterization: (1) The JEOL JEM-ARM300CF S/STEM is equipped with double spherical aberration correctors, cold field emission gun, dual large-angle EDS detectors, Gatan GIF Quantum, K2 IS direct electron detection camera, and OneView camera. This instrument offers the highest performance for atom-by-atom materials characterization with a spatial resolution of 0.65Å. (2) The Nion HERMES 200 provides EELS energy resolutions of 5.7 meV at 60 kV and 4.2 meV at 30 kV, which exceed the resolution boundaries of any commercially available TEM. Such instruments allow us to develop novel techniques to explore nanostructured materials structure and properties.
  • The Laboratory for Electron and X-ray Instrumentation (LEXI)

    A general materials characterization facility, houses FEI Magellan high-resolution SEM, FEI Quanta 3D FEG Dual Beam FIB System, FEI XL-30 FEG SEM, Philips CM-20 TEM, Bruker D5000, Rigaku SmartLab, and Ultima IV x-ray diffractometers, PNI AFM, x-ray 3D scope, and Hitachi S-4300SEN cold-FEG SEM.
  • The Surface Science Facility

    Established in 2015, has a Kratos AXIS Supra, a high-performance multi-technique instrument combining high-sensitivity x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy with a dual Al/Ag monochromatic x-ray source, high-resolution scanning field emission Auger (SEM, SAM, AES), ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy, and ion scanning spectroscopy.
  • The Thermal, Elemental, Mechanical, Physical, and Rheological (TEMPR)

    Properties user facility, established in 2019, houses a comprehensive suite of state-of-the-art characterization instruments, including thermal analysis tools (DSC, TGA, simultaneous DSC/TGA with evolved gas analysis, DMA), a laser ablation inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometer, a combustion/pyrolysis analyzer for quantifying gas-forming elements, rheometers, and an advanced size exclusion chromatography system.

Shared Facilities Leadership

Xiaoqing Pan

Director / Lead

Email: xiaoqing.pan@uci.edu
Office: 644 Engineering Tower
Phone: (949) 824-2368

Pan Research Group

Related Research Topic: IRG-1: Complex Concentrated Materials

William Bowman

co-Lead

Email: will.bowman@uci.edu
Office: 3419 Calit2 Building

Bowman Lab

Related Research Topic: IRG-1: Complex Concentrated Materials

Joe Patterson

co-Lead

Email: patters3@uci.edu
Office: 321 Rowland Hall
Phone: (949) 529-6854

The Patterson Lab

Related Research Topic: IRG-2: Bioinspired Active Materials