Welcome to our spaceship! (Or, if you’d rather read the scientific explanation, see the adjoining column.) It doesn’t hang in the sky, much in the way that bricks don’t – but it comes close. These pictures were taken at TU/e, where this set-up is installed and can be used to measure X-ray and Ultraviolet photoelectron spectra (XPS and UPS) under near-ambient pressure (NAP) conditions, i.e. up to 25 mbar. Apart from those, you’ll also find pictures of some of the laboratories at the Eindhoven University of Technology and looks into its daily life.

If you have any questions about what you’ve seen, please let us know in the comments!

This is the (almost) whole NAP-XPS system. The shiny hemisphere on the right is the electron energy analyzer – the heart of the NAP-XPS spectrometer. On the left in the front is the sample preparation chamber, where e.g. single crystal model catalysts are prepared with “atomic” precision under ultra-clean conditions.