The mission of the The University of Alabama’s Central Analytical Facility is to enable and facilitate collaborative, multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary, multi-campus and regional research involving major research instrumentation.
The Central Analytical Facility, or CAF, houses more than $10 million of micro-analytical and microscopy equipment. The CAF is a general user facility – with access to on and off campus users. It is staffed with a full time laboratory manager and instrumentation specialists who provide training and maintenance of the instruments, in conjunction with manufacturer service contracts ensuring that all tools are functioning and operating within specifications.
The range of instruments can provide 1D, 2D and 3D imaging from the atomic scale to millimeters. In addition, several of the tools can provide chemical mapping and crystallographic orientation and diffraction capabilities. The CAF instruments and techniques include a local electrode atom probe, focused ion beam microscopes, transmission electron microscope, scanning electron and microprobe microscopes, X-ray photon spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction.