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Mentor: Brendan Faeth

Mentor's Responsibility for PARADIM:  Graduate Student, Physics

REU intern:  Jesscia Dong

Faeth

I am a recent graduate of Kyle Shen's group at Cornell. I did my PhD research on combining Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES) with in situ electrical transport to study high temperature superconductivity in ultrathin films of FeSe/SrTiO3. In June I will begin work as the PARADIM staff scientist developing and operating the ARPES system.
 

Project Title: 

Development of real-time control and analysis software for Low Energy Electron Diffraction

Project Description: 

Low energy electron diffraction (LEED) is, in principle, a powerful probe of surface structures, as the penetration depth of low energy electrons used in the technique are comparable to that of photoemission experiments, i.e. only the top few layers.  The usefulness of such a technique for novel interfacial systems of interest to PARADIM users, which often cannot be studied structurally by conventional means such as XRD, is obvious.  Due to the nature of the technique, however, the process of extracting meaningful quantitative information from LEED diffraction patterns is both technically challenging and time consuming.  The goal of this project is to develop a set of advanced software tools allowing for real-time, automated LEED analysis as the data is collected, greatly improving the accessibility of such analysis for PARADIM users.

Project question that defines the REU student's project:

Can we develop real-time software tools for LEED atomic structural analysis?
 

Project plan/research task to answer the research question:

Student will build and develop a software suite for LEED control and real-time quantitative analysis.

List of tasks to be performed by the REU student and tasks to be performed by the mentor to answer the research questions:

Student and mentor will become familiar with programming with Igor Pro, building a software suite throughout the summer.  At the end of the project, the student will test their analysis suite on live diffraction data collected by the mentor in the lab.