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This facility houses instrumentation for determining the composition of the outermost few nanometers of solid materials and for imaging surface topography and chemistry. Since the chemistry at the surface of a material may differ from its bulk, surface-specific techniques are needed to characterize these differences. The surface of a material is the interface to the environment, so understanding its chemistry is critical to many applications. Corrosion behavior, adhesion, and the dissolution rate of biodegradable polymers are all strongly impacted by surface chemistry.
Instruments
- X-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS)
- Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer (ToF-SIMS)
- Atomic force microscope (AFM)
- Scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM)
Facility Contact: Stephen Golledge