Report on 23rd European Conference on Surface Science (ECOSS’23)
Rideal bursar Timothy Jones reports from the September 2005 event
 I am very grateful to be awarded a Rideal Travel Bursary which gave me the opportunity to attend the 23rd European Conference on Surface Science (ECOSS’23), held at the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany from 4-9 September, 2005. My work contributed to one oral presentation and two poster presentations.
I have benefited from attending of the conference both scientifically and culturally. The conference was attended by many leading surface scientists from around the world, presenting work in many different aspects of surface science including my own research field.
Of particular interest were plenary talks by Professor Klaus Kern (Max-Planck-Institut für Festkörperforschung) discussing the controlling of atomic and molecular assembly at surfaces; Professor Jens Norskov (Technical University of Denmark) discussing catalytic and enzyme hydrogen production. Amongst the many invited talks, Professor Rasmita Raval (University of Liverpool) reviewed the creation of chirality at surfaces under ultra-high vacuum (UHV) conditions which is directly related to my previous research and also relevant to my present research area of studying the interaction of chiral molecules with metal surfaces at the liquid-solid interface. A number of presentations were given on the subject of bimetallic surfaces. I am interested in the novel physical and chemical properties of such materials which we are trying to manipulate in the creation of ultra-selective heterogeneous enantioselective catalysts.
One of the main motivations for attending this conference was because my current postdoctoral project involves commissioning a photoelastic-modulation infrared absorption spectrometer (PM-IRAS) for the purpose of studying the adsorption of chiral molecules at the liquid-solid interface. This is a new technique to me and moves away from my traditional UHV based research. There were several presentations by researchers who had utilised the PM-IRAS technique in their work. Attending the talks and having the opportunity to discuss the technique with experts during the poster sessions has enabled me to achieve a better all round understanding of its capabilities.
In addition, we were able to discuss our work with a researcher from ETH-Zurich who works on an analogous catalytic system using the related technique of ATR. These discussions proved useful, giving us new ideas for sample preparation and characterisation. We were slightly disappointed that there were few groups presenting work specifically involving electrochemical sample preparation. However, we had some useful discussions with Prof. Klaus Wandelt ( University of Bonn) regarding electrochemical Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy. This forms an integral part of my current research project.
We were also interested in attending the conference to present our IR data as an oral presentation and a poster presentation (in collaboration with colleagues from the Department of Physics, University of Genoa , Italy ). Our presentations sparked interesting discussions, prompting useful suggestions of possible experiments that we would like to follow up.
I have also gained culturally from this trip. This is the first time I have travelled to Berlin and after the conference I was visited the many museums and art galleries this historic city has to offer. Overall, this was an excellent conference set in a very interesting city.
Dr Timothy Jones
University of St Andrews
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