PREVAC

PREVAC builds the instrument and the system it goes into. The hemispherical analysers, X-ray and UV sources, ion, electron and flood guns, effusion cells and electron-beam evaporators, quartz thickness monitors, magnetron sources and the controllers that drive all of them are designed and manufactured in-house in Rogów, Poland, and the same parts are then assembled into complete UHV platforms. When you buy a system from PREVAC you are buying from the company that made what is inside it.

That vertical range shows up as breadth. Sentys carries twenty-one PREVAC systems. Deposition runs from the plug-and-play PRIMS bench with up to three 2-inch magnetron sources, through standard and customised sputtering with DC, RF, pulsed-DC and HiPIMS, to fully automated iMBE and iPLD platforms with ten sources and 4-inch substrates. Analysis runs from a single-chamber XPS and UPS instrument to high-pressure photoemission that keeps measuring at 50 mbar, where the surface is doing something chemically interesting rather than sitting in perfect vacuum.

Then there is the part of the catalogue nobody puts on a poster: UHV tribometry from 10^-9 mbar to atmosphere, magneto-optical Kerr effect on ultra-thin films, UHV-compatible FTIR, thermal desorption, ion-beam etching, and end stations built around a synchrotron beamline's geometry. These exist because someone asked for them, which is the usual way a PREVAC product starts.

The connective tissue is what people underestimate. Transfer tunnels, linear transfer systems, manipulators and sample-holder standards are what turn three good instruments into one experiment, and PREVAC treats them as products rather than as fittings. A cluster where the sample never meets air is a transfer problem before it is a growth or an analysis problem.

Their electronics are built to drive equipment PREVAC did not make, including third-party gauges and ion and electron guns. That matters when a new instrument has to join a laboratory that already owns ten years of hardware. It is also why we quote single instruments as readily as complete platforms: a thickness monitor, an X-ray source, a heating power supply and a cathode are all things a group can buy on their own.

Ask PREVAC for something that does not exist yet and the answer is usually a drawing rather than a catalogue number.