Gaia machine is a ultrahigh vacuum equipment designed to perform tip-enhanced spectromicroscopies with subnanometer resolution. It contains an VT-STM Omicron head upgraded to withhold a high NA lens at a close distance from the tunnel junction. The in-vacuo lens system together with ambient optical elements permit the guidance of photons from light sources to the tip and from the tip to the spectrograph. Current available techniques are scanninc¡g tunneling induced luminescence (STML), tip enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) and tip enhanced photoluminescence (TEPL) both in CW and pulsed time-resolved schemes.
Sample preparation chamber contains a noble gas ion sputtering, an electron bombardment heating stage (permitting to heat up to 1400 K) and a set of molecular and atomic evaporators. Gaia has a thermal programed desorption (TPD) stage which permits to complement spectromicroscopy experiments with measuring desorption of small molecular species (up to 200 AMU) to perform surface- and nanoparticle-induced heterogeneous catalysis characterization at the nanoscale.
