Centre Castaing - UAR3623

The Raimond Castaing Microanalysis Centre pools and makes available technical and scientific expertise currently dispersed around the Toulouse site. The aim is to satisfy the needs of the community and enhance the potential of the laboratories and social and economic partners of the Midi-Pyrenees Region. The attractiveness of these companies is then increased as is their zone of influence contributing to greater R&D activity and thus to innovation, especially through concrete responses to various calls for tender both national and international.

The centre or hub covers an area of 965m2 (over 10 000 sq ft), in a high-security building: the Espace Clément Ader. It was designed and built following strict specifications to enable optimal operation of the various instruments to be used there.

The Castaing Centre houses 12 instruments for micro- and nano-analysis including the equipment required for preparing the specimens:

• 2 electron microprobes
• 4 scanning electron microscopes equipped with field emission guns (FEG-SEM) one with a dual beam
• 5 transmission electron microscopes
• 1 secondary-ion mass spectrometer

All the observation and analysis equipment is in a controlled-access area.

The Castaing Centre proposes instruments that are complementary to those of the laboratories that contributed to setting it up (CEMES, CIRIMAT, GET, LAAS, LAPLACE, LCC, LPCNO), consecutive to the broad on-site consultation of 2006.