Shared Laboratory Instrumentation
Centre for Materials and Surface Science, La Trobe University
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/surface/
The Centre for Material and Surface Science has Australia's most comprehensive suite of surface analysis instrumentation to probe in details the structure of materials; from high tech components to carbon fibres. The instrumentation collection includes X-ray Photoelection Spectroscopy (XPS), Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (TOF-SIMS), Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM), and synchrotron photoemission spectroscopy.
The equipment is used by over fifteen Australian and International universities and about thirty companies. The Centre, and many of it's partners, will be major users of the Australian Synchrotron when the imaging facilities are online. The Centre is moving to an eResearch environment where research collaborators can experience remote real time access to multiple views of instruments and samples, as well as the display of data as it is acquired.
VeRSI is:
- providing remote shared access to instrumentation
- designing and generation of an interface to control the equipment
- designing and developing a data storage and access model
The Shared Instrumentation project also includes an extension to the VeRSI Virtual BeamLine project with the production of a remote VBL at the Centre for Materials and Surface Science. This will allow La Trobe researchers and students to remotely access and monitor experiments from a virtual theatrette at the Protein Crystallography beamline at the Australian Synchrotron.