Gold membrane coaxes secrets out of surfaces

Thousand-fold signal amplification

26-Jun-2024 - Using a special wafer-thin gold membrane, ETH researchers have made it significantly easier to study surfaces. The membrane makes it possible to measure properties of surfaces that are inaccessible to conventional methods. “Surfaces were invented by the devil” - this quote is attributed to the ...

‘Hot’ new form of microscopy examines materials using evanescent waves

“This microscope technology is completely new, so we’re still learning specifically how and where it can be applied”

14-Nov-2023 - Conventional microscopes irradiate a sample, usually with light or electrons. Any reflected or scattered radiation can be used to build a detailed image and obtain characteristic information about a material’s surface. This is called an active measurement, but it isn’t the only technique that can ...

Advances in spectroscopy

New way to measure properties of a material’s surface layer

15-Nov-2022 - Physicists at The University of Texas at Arlington have developed a new technique that can measure the properties of the topmost atomic layer of materials without including information from the underlying layers. Researchers from the Positron Lab in the UTA Department of Physics utilized a ...

Surface chemistry reveals corrosive secrets

Precise Measurements are the Molecular Lens to Seeing Chemistry

18-Oct-2021 - One can easily see with the naked eye that leaving an old nail out in the rain causes rust. What does require the keen eyes and sensitive nose of microscopy and spectroscopy is observing how iron corrodes and forms new minerals, especially in water with a pinch of sodium and calcium. Thanks to a ...

Making the invisible visible

New method for studying atomic structures in material surfaces

21-May-2021 - Researchers from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the University of California Berkeley and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris use intense laser light in the extreme ultraviolet spectrum to generate a non-linear optical process on a laboratory scale – a process which until now has only been ...

How to Gently Caress Atoms: A single oxygen atom is used as a highly sensitive sensor

How can surfaces be studied as gently as possible on an atomic scale?

10-Jun-2020 - Oxygen is highly reactive. It accumulates on many surfaces and determines their chemical behavior. At the Vienna University of Technology, scientists study the interaction between oxygen and metal oxide surfaces, which play an important role in many technical applications - from chemical sensors ...

The origins of roughness

Origins of surface texture investigated

19-Feb-2020 - Most natural and artificial surfaces are rough: metals and even glasses that appear smooth to the naked eye can look like jagged mountain ranges under the microscope. There is currently no uniform theory about the origin of this roughness despite it being observed on all scales, from the atomic ...

The limits of friction

03-Apr-2018 - Friction is created when two surfaces slide one on top of the other. Since this consumes additional energy, this so-called sliding friction is considered an irksome yet inevitable aspect of dynamic processes. However, to set a stationary object in motion, its static friction must be overcome ...

Chemical hotspots

Scanning tunneling microscopy measurements identify active sites on catalysts

11-Sep-2017 - Chemistry live: Using a scanning tunneling microscope, researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) were able for the very first time to witness in detail the activity of catalysts during an electro-chemical reaction. The measurements show how the surface structure of the catalysts ...

Three-dimensional Direction-dependent Force Measurement at the Subatomic Scale

15-May-2017 - Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is an extremely sensitive technique that allows us to image materials and/or characterize their physical properties on the atomic scale by sensing the force above material surfaces using a precisely controlled tip. However, conventional AFM only provides the surface ...