An on-board sample cleaver has been developed in order to cleave small and hard-to-cleave samples. To acquire good cleaves from rigid samples, such as oxides, the alignment of the cleaving blade with respect to the internal crystallographic planes of these usually very small samples is crucial. This is extremely hard to realize as soon as the sample is introduced into vacuum. To have the opportunity to mount the sample and align it to the blade ex situ has many advantages. The design presented here makes it possible to cleave very tiny and rigid samples. As a result, better surfaces and alignments can be realized, which considerably simplifies and improves the experiments. Further, in this design the sample and the cleaver will have the same temperature, allowing us to cleave the sample at low temperature. This is a big advantage over prior cleaver-systems where the cleaver is at room temperature resulting in large temperature rise of the cooled sample when cleaving. As an example on results acquired using the on-board sample cleaver, data from angle resolved photo-emission measurements on the high-temperature superconductor La(2-x)SrxCuO4 are presented.
Acknowledgments: This research has been supported by the Swedish Research Council, the Göran Gustafsson Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation (through NCCR, MaNEP, and grant Nr 200020-105151), and the European Union.
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