Purpose of this site:

This facility is meant to:

• make it easier for outside visitors and prospective students to learn what we do 
• to provide easy acces to information needed by out stuff to perform their research and teaching duties 
• to provide information and services about our academic programs offer and how we organize them 

Atoms Made Visible
Individual atoms, forming a regular array on the surface of a crystal of the element germanium, can be seen in this image made with a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). . Since the atoms are hundreds of times smaller than the wavelength of visible light, they could not be revealed by any optical microscope, no matter how powerful. . The STM maps the profile of a surface on the atomic scale by detecting an electric current flowing from the surface to the point of a fine metal probe.