The OptiCool by Quantum Design is a magneto-optical cryostat using an innovative design that puts the sample volume in the heart of your optical environment. A custom 3.8 inch bore, split-coil, conical magnet offers fields perpendicular to the optical table up to ±7 tesla. The highly integrated design means, even with a magnet, your sample isn’t buried inside a large cryostat, far away from the optics. Seven side optical ports and one top optical port allow for optical access to your sample from a wide array of directions.

So, what can you do with it..?

Well, here’s what a few customers have been doing recently…

Near-field Optical Microscopy

Mengkun Liu, Associate Professor, Stony Brook University

“So I had my first OptiCool in 2020.” says Mengkun, “That was for me, at that time, a little bit risky because no-one had done a scanning probe in an OptiCool. But we did it in 2021 and we liked it so much that we actually purchased another one in 2022!”

“We were looking for a closed-cycle magneto-optical cryostat that is capable of performing atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning optical near-field microscopy (s-SNOM) in high magnetic field. OptiCool proved to be the system with the best stability which provides sub-nm vibrations for cyrogenic scanning probe measurements while still offering excessive access to external light. This brings us infinitely new possibilities for our research. Our lab now hosts two OptiCool systems (as of 2022)- one for infrared magneto-SNOM and one for terahertz magneto-SNOM.”

Mengkun Liu, Stony Brook University

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Dynamics and Control in Quantum Materials

Professor Rick Averitt (UCSD Physics) and Jovan Nelson (Graduate Student in the Stern Group, Northwestern University) discuss their latest research using OptiCool in these videos PLUS a recent publication: Magnetoelastic coupling to coherent acoustic phonon modes in the ferrimagnetic insulator GdTiO3

Other Possible applications for the OptiCool environment

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