Technological facilities

Since September 2004, the LCF is co-founder member of the Plate-forme de Technologie Commune (PTC –Joined Technology Platform) in partnership with Thales Research and Technology (TRT), Ecole Polytechnique and CNRS ( Scientific Research National Center).

The involvement of the Institute of Optics and its laboratory to this Technological Platform is a logical consequence of several scientific partnership agreements that have been concluded with Thales since 2003.

This Technology Platform, hosted by TRT, is dedicated, in one hand, to advanced research and development activities and on the other hand to micro and nanotechnologies teaching.

Therefore it allows LCF scientists and engineers proximity access to high level technologies.

As defined in the status of the platform, each co-founder owns one or more equipments. For its part, the LCF has bought and installed a nB3 e-beam lithography system from Nanobeam Ltd.

Thanks to this high-performance equipment (NBL3) and all the technological facilities open to the laboratory staff in the Joined Technological Platform, plasmonic and biophotonic projects are in progress. Nanofabrication for these applications has already led to promising results.

Although the e-beam machine has been returned to Thales in December 2019, the laboratory still has preferential access to it and to a number of other facilities in TRT's clean room, enabling research activities to continue under identical conditions.

The LCF also owns its own clean room facilities, located in Palaiseau. While the deposition equipments are mostly dedicated to X-UV applications thin layers (X-UV Team), the whole can be used by LCF staff.

Moreover, the laboratory keeps up strong collaborations with the major clean room facility in the Paris area : the  C2N in Palaiseau

Finally, it is worth recalling that for specific requests that could not be made in the facilities described above, all scientists also have access to the entire French National Nanofabrication Network (RENATECH), which includes the 5 large technology centres on French territory as well as smaller local plants.