Urgent Acquisition of a Small Instrumentation Suite for a CFI-funded Dilution Refrigerator

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In the CFI-VII competition, McGill has been granted several million dollars to upgrade the nanofabrication facility 'Nanotools II' as well as to purchase a variety of equipment. Gervais' lab received $484k (before taxes, in-kind excluded) to purchase a cryofree 8 mK dilution refrigerator (DR) fitted with a 12T superconducting magnet. This cryofree system is paramount to Gervais lab's sustainability, since a traditional DR consumes a large amount of liquid helium, typically 150 liters (~1000$) per week. Helium is also an irreplaceable and a non-renewable natural resource; futhermore nearly all the helium in Canada comes from the USA. Recent politics from the US Bureau of Land Management (see "The impact of helium shortages on basic research in physics"[Nature Physics 10, 467 (2014)] generated a great deal of uncertainty in the helium business, as well as a price hike for the vendors of cryofree systems. In order to stay within budget, we have lowered the field from 12 to 9T for our system, but despite this and three public round of tender, the final amount paid was $457k (Bluefors DR) + $29k (3He gas from Linde)= $486k. As a consequence, Gervais' lab has no CFI money left to purchase the small instrumentation suite (lock-in amplifiers, pre-amplifiers, current/voltage source, etc, etc) that is absolutely required to run experiments. This small instrumentation suite can be bought for a total of ~68k . Since the DR system is already at McGill, and its installation planned in the Winter of 2015, we are critically relying on the requested funds from the NSERC RTI program so that we can start to operate the apparatus in early Summer 2015.