Abstract
This chapter summarises the physical principles of optical absorption spectroscopy and its use for the characterisation of surfaces and interfaces. After a brief discussion of the fundamentals of absorption spectroscopy and its relation to quantum mechanics, the chapter discusses the basics of optics at interfaces, focusing on the absorption of light by molecules in the interfacial region. Because of fundamental similarities, the chapter will touch on spectroscopy of both electronic and vibrational transitions, with a strong focus on infrared absorption experiments. There is a brief discussion, with reference to examples, of experiments in internal and external reflection geometry, including a brief discussion of the measurement of spectra on different classes of substrates (metallic vs. transparent).
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Notes
- 1.
The term “polarisation” is ambiguous in this text, because we follow general literature usage. Polarisation can stand for the polarisation of light, as will be extensively used from Sect. 14.3 onward. In this paragraph, dielectric “polarisation” means the induction of an electric field, opposing an external field, in matter. A third meaning of polarisation, which is not used in this chapter, however, in Chap. 2 by C. D. Fenández-Solis et al. is the application of a controlled electrode potential other than the open circuit potential.
- 2.
As a side remark, we note that in general, both χ and \(\varepsilon_{\text{r}}\) are tensorial quantities, which we ignore in these equations for simplicity.
- 3.
Actually, the magnetic field vector is perpendicular to the electric field vector. Therefore, for the p-wave, the magnetic field vector has only a y-component that is different from 0, which is where the name transverse-magnetic originates from.
- 4.
The same phenomenon is referred to in Chap. 12 by J. Daillant as “total external reflection”, because at X-ray wavelengths, the refractive index situation is reversed compared to optical wavelengths, i.e. the medium with lower refractive index here may be the medium with higher refractive index when using X-rays.
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the Cluster of Excellence RESOLV (EXC 1069) funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. C. T. thanks the International Max Planck Research School for Surface and Interface Engineering in Advanced Materials (IMPRS-SurMat) for a scholarship. The authors thank Prof. M. Stratmann for continuous support.
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Erbe, A., Sarfraz, A., Toparli, C., Schwenzfeier, K., Niu, F. (2016). Optical Absorption Spectroscopy at Interfaces. In: Lang, P., Liu, Y. (eds) Soft Matter at Aqueous Interfaces. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 917. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24502-7_14
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