Postdoctoral Research Associate, Beamline I09

Job Ref: DIA0840/TH

Full time, three year fixed term

Division Science

Circa £33k

Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron science facility. Located at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire, we enable world-leading research across a wide range of scientific disciplines and industrial applications.

You will be responsible for the in-house research project on HAXPES studies of metal oxide thin films using the surface science end-station in EH2 on Beamline I09.

Beamline I09 is an undulator beamline that provides both soft (150 eV – 2.1 keV) and hard (2.1 – 18 keV) x-rays for investigating the atomic and electronic structures of a wide range of surfaces and interfaces using photoelectron spectroscopy (PES), near edge x-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS), x-ray standing waves (XSW) and photoelectron diffraction (PhD).

This position will focus on the research that utilizes hard x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (HAXPES) for studying the electronic properties, chemical compositions and atomic structures of metal oxide thin films, including cuprate/manganite heterostructures, proton conducting fuel cell superlattices, and transparent conducting oxide thin films. The samples will be prepared mostly by our collaborators using pulsed-laser deposition or molecular beam expitaxy in their institutes. The HAXPES experiments will be performed in a newly constructed UHV surface science end-station on the beamline, where samples can be uniquely characterized with both soft and hard x-rays. Other methods such as NEXAFS, XSW and soft x-ray angle-resolved photoemission (SX-ARPES) can be also applied for complementary information. In addition to the research project, the PDRA will be involved in commissioning the end-station (e.g., testing the electron analyzer or other detectors) and in some of the external user experiments that will also use the same end-station.

Duties:

• Day-to-day responsibility for the in-house research programme on metal oxide thin films including the analysis and publication of the results;

• testing and commissioning of the surface science end-station (e.g., sample heating, cooling, electron analyzer and other detectors);

• support of relevant research projects of the users, who will come from a diverse scientific background;

• presentation of the in-house research, beamline developments and scientific papers at meetings and conferences;

• assist with the general commissioning of beamline hardware and the development of data acquisition, visualisation and analysis software;

• assist the beamline staff in maintaining and running the beamline peripheral laboratories.

Closing date: 09 June 2013.