What does a CrossFit trainee who can deadlift 105 kg and a particle accelerator have in common? Energy, and lots of it! Four days a week at 05:00 am, Dr. Olga Girshevitz reports to CrossFit practice. “It is a unique community with insane energies,” says Dr. Girshevitz, a member of yet another unique group consisting of a mere 300 researchers worldwide that have the multidisciplinary knowledge and skills to master a particle accelerator. Moreover, Dr. Girshevitz and her team at the Surface Analysis Unit, Dr. Vladimir Richter and Nahum Shabi, together possess an outstanding combination of fundamental scientific skills and applicative capabilities that enable them to build some of the unit’s sophisticated instrumentation, cutting costs while fitting the machinery to their specific needs. “What we want to investigate or analyze is in line with the evolving needs of our many clients and partners. In recent years, we have recognized a growing need for an ion implanter system and utilized Dr. Richter’s 40 years of experience operating ion implanters to embark on a mission to build, at first, a small exemplar,” says Dr. Girshevitz. After studying this small ion implanter, Dr. Richter built a larger ion implanter which was made available to BINA’s clients. The system implants noble gases ions on the surface of materials (hundreds of nanometers deep maximum), changing their chemical, electrical and mechanical properties. This process requires low temperatures, which BINA’s ion implanter can provide, using a cooling system of the sample stage. Implanting the Elements of Change Let’s talk numbers: the cost of a commercial ion implantation system range between $2–5 million or more. That is one of the reasons why there is currently no other operating implanter to serve the Israeli industry or academia at large. “There is high demand for the ion implanter’s capabilities to change the materials’ optical, mechanical or electrical traits, studying and utilizing these changes for applications in quantum technology, microelectronics and even coloring diamonds in the gemstone industry. And so, in a very short time, we have managed to form several interesting research collaborations due to our handmade implanter,” says Dr. Girshevitz. A significant portion of this work is carried out in collaboration with the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center and the Soreq Nuclear Research Center and is understandably classified. “We are using the implanter to make defects in alloys to study the mechanism of this process and to find ways to reduce or prevent their damages.” Dr. Girshevitz also works with Prof. Issai Shlimak of BIU’s physics department, making defections in 2D materials such as graphene; his doctoral student Nir M. Yitzhak, who also works in Soreq, has co-authored two recent articles on the subject, published in Applied Surface Science journal. Another academic collaboration with Prof. Louisa Meshi of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev focuses on material engineering and analysis of defects by electronic microscopy, and its initial results were presented at the Materials Science and Engineering MSE Congress 2022 and published in Materials Characterization journal. Pushing Towards Instrumental Growth 22
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDU2MA==