December 2010 Archives

In Issue 47, vol. 22 (2010) of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, a special section features a compilation of articles on exploring surfaces and buried interfaces of functional materials by advanced X-ray and neutron techniques. Many of the authors are members of a group established in the Japan Applied Physics Society, and this is their 9^th collection of articles since 2001. Unlike many other surface-sensitive methods, these techniques do not require ultra high vacuum, and therefore, a variety of real and complicated surfaces fall within the scope of analysis. It must be particularly emphasized that the techniques are capable of seeing even buried function interfaces as well as the surface. Furthermore, the information, which ranges from the atomic to mesoscopic scale, is highly quantitative and reproducible. Such features are fairly attractive when exploring multilayered materials with nanostructures (dots, tubes, wires, etc), which are finding applications in electronic, magnetic, optical and other devices. Visit the Web page to download the papers in this collection, http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-8984/22/47