Talks by Bruce

This page is for collecting talks that I give on science, on X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy, and on the data analysis software. Most of my talks are licensed using a Creative Commons License. See the text of the talks or the links below for how that affects you, the reader.

  EXAFS Analysis Using FEFF and FEFFIT

The course materials for a three-day course I developed back in 2000.

  A Practical Introduction to Multiple Scattering Theory

This began as a lecture developed for the VII International School and Symposium on Synchrotron Radiation in Natural Science in Zakopane, Poland, 8-13 June, 2004 and for a four-day workshop on EXAFS Data Collection and Analysis at the National Synchrotron Light Source, June 22--25, 2004. I have given this lecture many times since, occassionally modifying and upgrading it.

A companion article to the talk from Zakopane was published as B. Ravel, Journal of Alloys and Compounds 401:1-2 (2005) pp. 118-126. Here's the Elsevier ScienceDirect link. The Document Object Identifier is 10.1016/j.jallcom.2005.04.021

• PDF file

  Multiple Scattering Theory and Third Generation Synchrotron Science

This lecture was presented at the Workshop on X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy and Micro-Spectroscopic Techniques, 20-21 February, 2006 at the Swiss Light Source.

• PDF file
• LaTeX source tarball

  Using XAFS in Unusual Ways

This is a talk on some of my current (as of October 2004) research interests that I prepared for visits to Argonne and SSRL. This covers analysis I have done on Barium Tanatalum Oxynitride using an interesting theory-based analytical approach. The second half of the talk is about work I am doing with an astrophysicist collaborator to see if we can determine anything about the interstellar medium using satellite observations of far-away X-ray sources. Papers were written on both topics:

• Role of local disorder in the dielectric response of BaTaO₂N, B. Ravel, Y-I. Kim, P.M. Woodward, and C.M. Fang, Physical Review B, 73, p. 184121 (2006)
• Determining the grain composition of the interstellar medium with high resolution X-ray spectroscopy. J.C. Lee and B. Ravel, The Astrophyscial Journal, 622:2,1 (2005) pp. 970-976.

• PDF file
• LaTeX source tarball

  A Synchrotron Spectroscopy Primer

This is a talk given at the lunchtime seminar in the Biosciences Division at Argonne on January 16, 2006. It's a fairly simple talk, providing a broad introduction to absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy for a crowd that, I presumed, knew little about inner shell spectroscopy or synchrotron science. It's a bit tounge-in-cheek and certainly not rigorous.

• Open Document Presentation file
• PDF file

  Posters from the XAFS13 Conference

The XAFS13 Conference was held July 9-14, 2006 in Stanford, CA, USA. I presented three posters. Here they are as PDF and as the Open Document Format presentation file.

1. A pH-dependent X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy study of U adsorption to bacterial cell walls.
   [PDF 0.7MB] :: [ODP 0.4MB]
2. The difficult chore of measuring coordination by EXAFS
   [PDF 1.2MB] :: [ODP 1.7MB]
3. Solid state astrophysics using the techniques of X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy
   [PDF 2.1MB] :: [ODP 2.3MB]

  An ARTEMIS example explaining multiple k-weight and multiple data set fitting

This is one of the talks that I presented at a workshop on EXAFS and EXAFS analysis at the Physics Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences that was held November 13-15, 2006. In this example, I use some data from one of my research projects to explain the concepts of multiple k-weights and multiple data sets in EXAFS analysis.

• Open Document Presentation file
• PDF file