HSC3: Surfaces, Interfaces and Nanostructures

Grenoble, 9 to 13 October 2006

Part of the Marie Curie Conferences and Training Courses

Purpose

Nano-objects are more and more present in the everyday world. The nanoscale is not just another step towards miniaturization. It is a qualitatively new scale where materials properties, such as melting point or electrical conductivity, new emission wavelengths and electronic tunnelling for semi-conductor quantum dots, differ significantly from the same properties in the bulk.

These properties are used, e.g. in catalytic gas exhaust systems, blue or green lasers, electronic chips or high density magnetic recording media. Understanding and tailoring the new physical properties of surfaces, interfaces and nanoparticles is thus of paramount technological and fundamental importance and “nanoscience” seeks to understand these new properties. Because these properties are often fully determined by their intimate atomic structure, size and morphology, it is essential to characterize these structural properties. To this end, X-rays and neutrons scattering are well suited techniques, that can in addition be applied in situ, e.g. during a chemical reaction on a surface, in ultra-high vacuum or at high temperature, at high pressure or during the growth of quantum dots or nano-wires, or during the nano-patterning of a substrate … In tutorial lectures this course is intended to provide the participants with an introduction to the fundamentals of surface physics, growth on surfaces, surface and interfaces structure, surface reactivity and nanophysics. Detailed courses on the techniques to analyse them will follow, mostly using hard X-rays and neutrons, including grazing incidence X-ray scattering at wide (GIXD) and small (GISAXS) angles, anomalous scattering, coherent scattering , X-ray standing wave analysis of surface structures and magnetic neutron scattering.

The course is divided in two days of fundamental lectures and three full days of practical and tutorials, devoted to neutron reflectometry, spin polarization and time of flight measurements at the ILL, surface X-ray standing waves and “nanotomography” of quantum dots at the ESRF, on the ID32 and ID01 beamlines. A dedicated specific course will introduce each of these three days. Then, on each beamline, a group will learn how to perform measurements, while another group will learn how to analyze and interpret the data.

Organizers

Till Hartmut METZGER and Gilles RENAUD, N. Petricola (secretariat)

Topics

Introduction to the physics of surfaces, interfaces, nanostructures, growth and reactivity. Introduction to the techniques of grazing incidence x-ray diffraction (GIXD), surfaces diffraction (SXRD), grazing incidence small angle x-ray scattering (GISAXS), anomalous scattering, coherent scattering, x-ray standing waves (XSW), magnetic neutron and x-ray scattering, spin polarisation, time-of-flight measurements.

Sponsors