Interfacial Chemistry at the Advanced Light Source with Ethan Crumlin

In this one-minute audio, Ethan Crumlin, Deputy for Science in the Chemical Sciences Division and a staff scientist at the Advanced Light Source, explains how APXPS, a specialized technique at the Advanced Light Source, identifies a “rainbow” of interfacial chemistry products essential to high-performance batteries and other energy technologies.

Transcript

[00:00:00] So, Ambient Pressure XPS (APXPS) is an excellent characterization technique for looking at interfaces. And the ALS is a pioneer in the Ambient Pressure XPS characterization — both science and development. We have world leaders with regards to the development, the science, and expansion of that methodology, and tool, and technique.

And so, its unique feature is that you can get a portfolio of information of an interface, because you can collect information from the solid, the vapor, and the interfacial species or the liquid. If there's a liquid interface there — many other characters — the techniques either see just the bulk, they can't see, they see the interface, or they can't see past the liquid and they can't get below that. Or they can only look at one feature, I would say, where [00:01:00] APXPS can, because it's chemically and elementally sensitive, it can sense, essentially, the whole chemical environment. And you can get information from many spectral features and signatures.

Now if you're thinking about, characterization as like a color — we're not just seeing red or green, right? We're seeing the rainbow. So, we can get the rainbow of information with APXPS compared to just one small piece.