Availability & User Fees
The use and services of the Electron Microprobe Laboratory at the University of Oklahoma are available to all individuals associated with academic institutions, public agencies, and private enterprise.
User Fees
Costs for usage of the electron microprobe laboratory at the University of Oklahoma depend on both the affiliation of the user and ultimate usage of the data obtained. We differentiate two basic classes of users: Academic Users and Commercial/Private Users.
Academic Users are defined as individuals affiliated with public or private academic institutions, and who are addressing research problems of purely academic interest. This does not include individuals with such affiliations that are conducting research for personal business, or as consultants to (or subcontracted by) privately- or publicly-owned, for-profit enterprises.
University of Oklahoma Academic policy. The first priority of our facility is to meet the analytical research needs of the faculty, students, post-doctoral associates, research staff, and visiting scientists at the University of Oklahoma. In deference to this priority, we will work with users from within the University of Oklahoma system to address their analytical needs within fixed-budget research programs. The lab fee for OU users is $20 per hour, capped at a maximum of $200 per 24-hour day.
Academic Users, outside the University of Oklahoma: $60 per hour, capped at a maximum of $600 per 24-hour day.
Private/Commercial Users are defined as all other researchers gathering data for ultimate use by private individuals or for privately- or publicly-owned enterprises that ultimately operate for profit. User fees depend on the nature of the service being provided to the user:
Standard Service: involves the detailed investigation of the structures, phase relations, and/or quantitative (by WDS) or semi-quantitative (by EDXA) determination of the composition of individual phases in solid materials. This service is offered to users operating on behalf of any privately- or publicly-owned business, and is charged at the standard rate of $175 per hour or $1750 per (contiguous) 24-hour day.
Qualitative/Semi-Quantitative Service: is for simple phase/material identification, and involves the simple qualitative or semi-quantitative analysis of solids to determine approximate composition and/or origin of a sample. This service is offered to private individuals only, generally for the purpose of material identification (i.e., typically for answering such questions as "what is this material?" or "could this sample be a meteorite?"). The user is usually furnished with one or more images of the material and one or more printouts of energy-dispersive x-ray spectra that are crucial to its identification. The standard cost for this service is $50 per sample that require no more than 20 minutes of on-beam time; samples requiring longer will be charged at the Standard Service rate of $175/hour. Samples for identification cannot be larger than 5 mm x 5 mm x 2 mm as provided to the lab; we will not cut identification samples from larger bulk materials.
