Speaker
Ulrike Diebold
(Institute of Applied Physics, TU Wien)
Description
The arrangement of the top layer of atoms on a solid – and the resulting electronic and chemical properties – affect and sometimes even dominate its functionality. In the talk, I will showcase how we can use basic physical phenomena – tunneling, diffraction, and change in resonance frequencies – to measure surface properties in an atom-by-atom fashion. By investigating well-defined samples in a controlled environment, such experiments can be tightly interlinked with theoretical computations. Examples include assessing the acidity of individual surface atoms; pushing the size of catalytically-active nanoclusters to their physical limit; and extending ultrahigh-vacuum experiments to the liquid phase.
Primary author
Ulrike Diebold
(Institute of Applied Physics, TU Wien)
