National Synchrotron Light Source Seminar

X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS) spectroscopy is a technique for exploring the details of how x-rays are absorbed by an atom in a matter at energies near the core-level binding energies. XAFS measurement provides a practical and straightforward way to determine the chemical state and local atomic structure for the selected atomic species. Over the past forty years XAFS has benefited largely from the development of synchrotron radiation science and technology, from high brilliant sources, novel beamline optics to high performance detectors and end station facilities. To a large extent, these were pushed by various challenging practical applications from basic research and industry. In this talk I will present a brief overview of these developments and some of my previous work to improve the performance of XAFS beamlines. These include the development and improvement of XAFS facilities at the 3W1B beamline (BSRF), detector development for thin film and near surface XAFS measurements at the XDD beanline (SSLS), and the design of a novel X-ray device for energy filtering and monochromatizing based on X-ray refractive lens at ANKA. Some scientific cases will be involved, such as dilute magnetic semiconductors, high performance catalysts for hydrogen storage and ferromagnetic gold nanoparticles, etc.