Speaker
Description
Our understanding of the physical and chemical properties of liquid interfaces under realistic environmental and operating conditions on the molecular scale still falls far short of what has been achieved for solid-vapor interfaces over the past decades. This limitation hampers the development of, e.g., more precise climate models and electrochemical devices with increased efficiency. The main reason for this situation is the often greater difficulty in the preparation of liquid interfaces (compared to solids) with controlled properties and their investigation with high interface specificity under realistic conditions.
The future Enhanced Liquid Interface Spectroscopy and Analysis (ELISA) beamline at BESSY-II aims at addressing these scientific and technological challenges through a concept that tailors both beamline optics and endstation infrastructure to the specific requirements of liquid interface science. The beamline is partly financed through funds from the CatLab project and is being developed jointly with the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, which is mainly responsible for the beamline components, while the FHI effort focuses on the endstation and sample environment development.
The beamline combines soft X-ray and infrared (IR) radiation, both originating from the storage ring, which are incident on the sample surface at the same time and the same location. While core-level spectroscopy, in particular ambient pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (APXPS), provides information on the elemental and chemical composition as well as potential gradients at the interface, reflection-absorption IR spectroscopy (RAIRS) offers complementary information about the orientation and bonding of molecules at the liquid-solid and liquid-vapor interface, expands the pressure range of in situ and operando experiments, and provides an excellent method to monitor possible radiation-induced damage to the interface and surrounding media in X-ray based spectroscopies. Simultaneous to RAIRS and APXPS, grazing incidence X-ray scattering (GIXS) investigations will be possible at the same sample location, thus providing additional information about morphological changes to the interface under investigation. It is expected that the ELISA beamline will not only be an asset for the investigation of liquid interfaces, but also for heterogeneous chemical reactions at thin film samples, which are of particular interest in the CatLab project.
References
1 S. Vadilonga, P. Dumas, U. Schade, K. Holldack, K. Hinrichs, G. Reichardt, T. Gerber, A. Vollmer, J.P. Hofmann, H. Oertel, B. Rech, R. Schlögl, J. Viefhaus, H. Bluhm, Synchrotron Radiation News (2022). DOI: 10.1080/08940886.2022.2082213.
| Abstract Number (department-wise) | AC 6.5 |
|---|---|
| Department | AC (Schlögl) |
