Research

XAFS and its users

The experimental possibilities offered by the XAFS beamline attract several research groups from national and international research centers and universities. Since 2004, more than 500 proposals requesting beamtime at XAFS have been submitted to the Elettra Proposal review Panel for evaluation. So far, more than 220 experiments have been approved and carried out on the beamline, and their results published in peer reviewed international scientific journals.  Users submitting a proposal for the first time are warmly invited to browse our publication list in order to get a better overview of the beamline capabilities and typical experiments.

Research fields

Research ranges from fundamental physics and catalysis to material science and nanotechnolgy. EXAFS spectroscopy provides microscopic structural information of a sample under investigation through the analysis of its X-ray absorption spectrum. It allows the determination of the chemical environment of a single element in terms of number and type of neighbours, interatomic distances and structural disorder. Such information is confined within a distance given by the mean free path of the photoelectron in the condensed matter, which is between 4 and 8 Å radius from the photoabsorber. EXAFS is a powerful local structural probe, which does not require long-range order.

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