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NOTE: no class on Feb 2, Tuesday due to jury duty.

NOTE: No classs on Feb. 4, Thursday due to jury dury.  Class will resume next week and we will work out the makeup lectures.

NOTE: No class on March 1, Tuesday due to an NSF PI meeting that I have to attend in DC.

Please reply to Renee's poll about class make-up times.

The last several decades have seen an explosion in the number of experimental techniques being developed to characterize materials.  In particular, there has been exponential growth in the coupling of microscopic methods with conventional spectroscopic characterization tools.  This has been due mainly to the renaissance in microscopy over the last quarter century (three Nobel Prizes) and the advent of significant computational power "on a bench".

Because many of these micro/nano characterization methods have developed from many different disciplines, the "local" language sometimes appears not to be translatable from one technique to the next without considerable difficulty.  Moreover, because there are such a plethora of techniques (and their associated acronyms) it becomes difficult for the practitioner (or user) of the method to comprehend the physical basis behind the various techniques. 

In this course, I will attempt to give the student a reasonable physical understanding of the many micro/nano characterization techniques available and the basis for the quantitation methodology.  As best as possible, I will try to keep a common "language" so that it becomes easier for the reader to see the similarities between the methods. I have decided to limit discussion primarily to those methods that can be used to characterize material from volumes less than a cubic micron.  To some extent, this is arbitrary, but it does lend itself to techniques that can be performed in the context of a "microscope".