The week beginning the 8th May saw the installation of FaRMS’s new Rigaku Smart Lab SE diffractometer in the School of Physics. For experts: the two-dimensional detector on this system will be especially powerful for off-specular measurements on thin film samples, allowing us to more efficiently probe the in-plane lattice parameters in our thin film samples.
The new x-ray system in the School of Physics.
Team members Dr Lottie Harding and PhD student Florence Legg were recently at the ID11 beamline at ESRF, Grenoble, France, conducting some high temperature oxidation studies on Florence’s mixed-actinide oxide epitaxial thin films.
Dr Lottie Harding (left) and Florence Legg (right) with Beam Line Scientist (and Bristol alumna) Dr Eleanor Lawrence Bright at the ID11 end station.
Several members of the FaRMS team attended the 52nd Journées des Actinides (JdA) conference at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, Germany. Congratulations to PhD student Florence Legg on winning the Best Poster Prize, for her work entitled “Epitaxial light actinide oxide thin films”.
Florence Legg next to her prize-winning poster.
Members of the FaRMS team are authors of newly published study entitled “Structure and phase transitions of metastable hexagonal uranium thin films”, in the APS journal Physical Review Materials. A link to the paper is here. First author, Rebecca Nicholls, is a PhD student in the Bristol-Bath Centre for Doctoral Training in Condensed Matter Physics, (CDT-CMP), and is jointly supervised by Chris Bell and Ross Springell. All of the samples grown in this study were fabricated using the FaRMS sputtering system. Congratulations Rebecca!