After successful completion of the course, students are able to

• present the physicochemical foundations of experimental techniques of materials characterization,
• assess which methods are most suited to measure a given physicochemical property of interest,
• interpret experimental results to obtain information of the nature of materials,
• carry out computational chemistry calculations to address problems in the area of solids, surfaces, and nanoparticles,
• interpret theoretical results to formulate experimentally testable hypotheses and vice-versa,
• formulate applications of the methods to characterize solids and heterogeneous catalysts,
• take part in the design of new methods in materials science and catalysis.

• Structure of Materials: Crystals, Real vs. Reciprocal Space.
• Surfaces and Nanoparticles.
• Electronic Structure of Materials, Bonding on Surfaces and Applications to Catalysis
• X-Ray Diffraction Methods.
• Texture and Morphology, Microscopy.
• Principles of Vibrational Spectroscopy. Acidity and Basicity of Surfaces and Probe Molecules.
• NMR Spectroscopy.
• Auger Electron, X ray and UV Photoelectron Spectroscopies
• Experimental aspects of Electron spectroscopy. XAS
• Defects in Crystals, Charge and Heat transport
• Machine Learning for materials characterization
• Materials Database.

Teaching will be mostly presential during the course in BA 02A (as far as the Covid situation allows).

The presentation of the course (03.03.22) will be online via Zoom.

For data protection purposes, we can only respond to enquiries sent from an official TU (student) e-mail address !

At the end of the semester, students will be given a list of topics related to the contents of the course. They must choose one and prepare a short presentation (either individually on in groups of two) to be delivered over Zoom.