May 19, 2016
This week I’m doing some research at Elettra Sincrotrone in Trieste, Italy on some noble metal complexes what I prepared previously. We are recording their X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS).
XAFS is a spectroscopic technique that uses x-rays to probe the physical and chemical structure of matter at an atomic scale. XAFS is element-specific, in that x-rays are chosen to be at and above the binding energy of a particular core electronic level of a particular atomic species. Because all but the lightest elements have core-level binding energies in the x-ray regime, nearly all elements can be studied with XAFS. The emphasis has traditionally been on the heavier elements (of Z>15 or so).
