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.
• Density Functional Theory, Materials Modelling and Reactivity.
• Principles of Vibrational Spectroscopy.
• X-Ray Diffraction Methods.
• Texture and Morphology, Microscopy
• Auger Electron, X ray and UV Photoelectron Spectroscopies.
• Experimental aspects of Electron spectroscopy. XAS.
• NMR Spectroscopy.
• Defects in Crystals, Charge and Heat transport.
• Machine Learning for materials characterization.
• Materials Database.

Teaching will be presential during the course in BA 02A.

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.