Research Facilities


Central Laboratory Facilities

Our Department has invested millions of dollars and great deal of manpower and resources to establish the Central Laboratory. This Laboratory not only provides top-grade experimental equipment for academic staff and graduate students to use, it also presents itself as a teaching laboratory for undergraduate students.

Thin Film Deposition Facilities

High vacuum coating system, low pressure chemical vapour deposition systems, sputtering thin film coating system, spin coater, pulsed-laser deposition system, helium leak detector, RF ion source.

Materials Characterization

Transmission electron microscope, scanning electron microscope with energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer and cathodoluminescence system, variable pressure SEM, X-ray diffractometers, rotating anode X-ray source, EDAX X-ray microanalysis system, micro X-ray fluorescence, vibrating sample magnetometer, 1-300 kN loading machines, 100 kN hydrautic dynamic testing machine, impact tester, fatigue tester, hardness tester, wetting balance, atomic force microscope, scanning tunnelling microscope, surface profiler, differential scanning calorimeter, thermomechanical analysis system, thermogravimetric analysis system, dynamic mechanical analysis system, Mossbauer spectrometer, arc melting furnace.

Equipment for Optical Measurement

Stereo, inverted and ordinary optical microscope, Raman and microRaman spectrometers, FTIR spectrometer, UV-VIS-IR double beam spectrometer, Argon laser, nitrogen laser, excimer laser, DCR-2 Nd:YAG laser, Q-switched and mode-locked Nd:YAG laser, CW/Mode-Locked Ti:Sapphire laser, optical parametric oscillator, intensified CCD detector.

Computational Facilities

Currently in the Physics Department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong there are various workstation clusters, HP Alpha/SUN. Main computing power comes from HP Alpha and Intel-P4 clusters.
Servers :
  • 2 x SUN Enterprise E250 Servers (2 CPUs each)
  • 1 x Alpha Server 4100 (4 CPUs)
  • 1 x Aplha Server 2100 (4 CPUs)
  • 1 x Novel Server (Intel CPU)
  • 2 x DNS/NIS/DHCP Servers (Intel CPU)
  • 1 x Webmail Server (Intel CPU)
    Workstations :
  • 16 Intel-P4 Linux Workstations in Cluster
  • 24 DEC XP900 Workstations
  • 15 DEC 500AU Workstations
  • 5 DEC 500/400 Workstations
    PC Laboratories :
  • 32 Intel-Tualatin PCs and fully equipped AV devices.
  • 18 Intel-P4 PCs and fully equipped AV devices.
    At the University Supercomputer Centre :
  • Sun HPC 6500 server;
  • Orbit IBM RS/6000 SP system with 64 processors and 64GB RAM;
  • Orpin Fire 6800 SMP server with sixteen 900 MHz UltraSPARC III processors and 64GB RAM.

    • Others

    10 K closed cycle refrigerating system, thermolumine-scence dating system, 20 GHz digitizing oscilloscope, Tektronix logic system, pulse-echo ultrasonic detection system, laser doppler velocimeter.