Invited Paper SY+SS+BI-TuA10
The Brightest Light Downunder

Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 4:40 pm, Room 310

The Australian Synchrotron, a 3 GeV Instrument located in Melbourne, is the newest facility of its type in the world and is poised to become the single largest scientific and technological user facility in the Southern hemisphere. This talk will outline some if the key aspects of the local Science driving the future developments of the facility. An example of work in the area of nanoscale wetting of surfaces will also be described. Synchrotron small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) has been used to investigate the in situ immersive wetting of ultrarough surfaces which exhibit superhydrophobicity with extreme water contact angle (θ=169). Reduced scattering contrast observed from rough surfaces when partially or totally wetted reveals significant physical differences between superhydrophobic surfaces not otherwise apparent from conventional contact angle measurements. As a complementary technique to static and dynamic contact angle measurements, transmission SAXS-based immersive wetting measurements promise more predictive models for how complex heterogeneous morphologies affect the phenomenon of wetting.