Astor Lectures: Oxides surfaces - opening the Pandora's box.
Almost every material, including human beings, are either oxides or hydroxides at their surface. Despite this, our understanding of oxide surfaces is relatively primitive. There are many reasons for this, ranging from the limitations of many conventional methods for insulators, the complications of understanding scanning probe images of surfaces, errors in density functional methods used to help understand experimental results as well as oversimplifications as to what oxide surface structures are.
While it has often been thought that the surfaces of oxides are simple, in many cases they are not and can be far more complex than those of semiconductors and metals. Over the last decade there has been substantial progress and we are now starting to understand many of the forces that determine their structure. This talk will provide an overview of both older and very new work experimental and theoretical work, tracing the understanding from earlier concepts such as polarity to better analyses in terms of local bonding of polyhedral structures to some very recent work based upon dealing with oxide surfaces as partially ordered with both enthalpy and entropy terms being important.
Date: 14 October 2015, 16:00 (Wednesday, 1st week, Michaelmas 2015)
Venue: Hume-Rothery Building, Parks Road OX1 3PH
Venue Details: Department of Materials
Speaker: Professor Laurence Marks (Northwestern University)
Organiser: Professor Martin Castell (University of Oxford)
Host: Department of Materials
Part of: Astor Lectures
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Martin Castell