The Department of Chemistry invites you to its departmental seminar today at 4:10 p.m. in Fulmer Hall, room 201.
Dr. Gerald T. Seidler from the Department of Physics at the University of Washington will present, (Some) Light Source Science without the Synchrotron.
Abstract: The Department of Energy’s synchrotron light sources provide a gold-standard of technical capability, user support, and scientific discovery. However, experiments at these national user facilities come with obstacles to progress including: expensive preparation and travel; difficulties studying samples that are radioactive, biohazards, or extremely air-sensitive; long delays between experiment iterations; and highly competitive beamtime access policies. These issues are especially pronounced for high-resolution x-ray spectroscopies such as x-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS) and x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES). For XAFS and XES, unlike x-ray diffraction and x-ray microtomography, there has been little or no alternative to the synchrotron. Failure to get time at oversubscribed beamlines has meant no access to these methods. Given the often unique role of XAFS and XES for characterization of local atomic and electronic structure in addition to oxidation state and metal-ion spin, we have launched a research program aimed at resuscitating laboratory-based spectroscopies using only conventional x-ray sources. In this seminar, I’ll introduce these methods to non-experts and then survey progress on lab XAFS and XES instrumentation at the UW before discussing a range of present and future applications spanning f-electron chemistry, battery research, catalysis, environmental science, and nanophase toxicology.
Acknowledgements: This research was supported by the University of Washington Clean Energy Institute by the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, and by the United States Department of Energy, through Basic Energy Sciences, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and a DOE subcontract from Los Alamos National Labs.
