The Construction and Application of a Novel Glove-Box Deposition System to the Study of Air-Sensitive Materials by Tunneling Spectroscopy

Abstract

This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in Review of Scientific Instruments and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1137895.The construction and application of a high-vacuum deposition system housed in a recirculating, catalytically scrubbed, inert-atmosphere glove box is reported. This system is specifically applied to the fabrication of tunnel diodes used in a surface vibrational spectroscopy called inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy or lETS. Through the use of this inert-atmosphere adsorption/ fabrication system, tunneling spectra have been obtained from a variety of air-sensitive compounds adsorbed on aluminum oxide. Up to now, spectra of some of the species reported here have been unattainable by the adsorption techniques used in lETS. The test molecules employed in this study included TCNE (tetracyancethylene), TCNQ (tetracyanoquinodimethane), and CO2(CO)s' TCNE adsorbed reactively on thin-film alumina under nitrogen to form a species with a vibrational spectrum similar to that of the TCNE--2 ion, while TCNQ appears to form the monoanion under the same adsorption conditions.K. W. Hipps and Ursula Mazur. (1984). The Construction and Application of a Novel Glove-Box Deposition System to the Study of Air-Sensitive Materials by Tunneling Spectroscopy. Review of Scientific Instruments., 55, 1120-1124