Complete Fission Track dating facilities are available at the FU Berlin. We have a fully equipped mineral separation laboratory for concentrating apatite and zircon. Facilities for mounting, polishing, and etching samples are in collaboration with University of Potsdam. We host a Zeiss © Axioplan 2 microscope with a maximum magnification of 1250 x paired with a Drawing Board VI ©, stage control, LED courser mouse and the FT Stage © software for counting and length measurements. Data record and …

The lab is equipped with a Leica DMR microscope with a drawing tube, a Kinetek computer-driven stage, a Calcomp digitizing tablet, and FT Stage software. A video camera is mounted on the triaxial head of the microscope, allowing a group of people to observe a slide simultaneously. At present, we are only analyzing apatites. However, we plan on analyzing zircons in the future.

Samples of all kinds are pretreated in our sample preparation laboratories. Samples are usually first dried, sieved or separated into magnetic or non-magnetic components in a magnetic separator based on their magnetic properties. Separation based on different mineral densities is also carried out here. Rock samples are ground in a ball mill and then further processed in the clean room laboratory using wet chemical methods.

In the case of cosmogenic nuclide samples for the in situ-produced …

The laboratory for microscopy focuses on the specific requirements of microfacies analysis of lake sediments, but also offers a wide range of possibilities for other applications. Sedimentological, petrographic and microfacies analyses on all kinds of covered and uncovered thin sections and polished sections with transmitted and incident light are performed.

The micropaleontology lab is equipped to conduct morphological analyses including extraction, microscopic preparation and taxonomic investigations of microfossils from terrestrial plants e.g. pollen grains and aquatic organisms e.g. diatom valves and chironomids from lake sediment archives or permafrost deposits. Microfossil analyses are used to investigate spatial and temporal changes and environmental reconstructions in Arctic terrestrial ecosystems.
The extraction of microfossil remains …

The microscopy lab comprises facilities for infrared microthermometric equipment for fluid inclusion research and reflected-light microscopy for organic petrography.
The microthermometry lab focusses on microthermometric studies of fluid inclusions in minerals, analyses of molecular compositions of gas-bearing fluid inclusions and reconstruction of P-T-x condition during mineral precipitation. Techniques being used are microthermometry, transmitted light microscopy (visible and near …

The microscopic analysis of microfossils or sedimentological specimens is part of the basic training in palaeontology. Microfossils are often not visible in the field with the naked eye or a magnifying glass. Nevertheless, in order to determine whether a rock contains microfossils, thin sections (slices of rock a few tenths to hundredths of a mm thick) are made from a rock sample, in which cross-sections of microfossils may be visible under the microscope. The microfossils can be obtained by …

Sample preparation instruments are available for all kinds of samples for scanning electron microscopes and transmission electron microscopes: Gold-Palladium Sputter Coater - Leica; Carbon Coater - Leica; Cryo Sample Preparation - Leica; Gatan Model 656 Dimple Grinder - a precision tool used to mechanically produce dimples in the surface of materials like ceramics, semiconductors and metals; Gatan Model Duo Mill 600 - a post-ion milling device used to prepare electron transparent specimens for …

The "Automated Mineralogy Lab" is equipped with a field emission SEM and light microscope for thin section mapping. The Zeiss Sigma 300 VP Field-Emission Scanning Electron Microscope is equipped with a Zeiss Gemini column, two Bruker Quantax Xflash 60 mm² SSD EDS detectors for quantitative element analysis, one variable pressure secondary electron detector (VPSE), one high definition backscatter detector (HDBSE), one Inlens detector, two Zeiss ATLAS correlative microscopy systems, two …

The sedimentology lab at the Permafrost Research section aims to study the transport and accumulation processes of permafrost-related deposits and classify sediment sequences in general. Therefore, the following parameters are investigated: sediment structure description, grain-size distribution and mass specific magnetic susceptibility.