Regoutz Group

Category Archives: Collaborations


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Mid-term meeting for MSCA BETTERXPS project

On the 30th June and 1st of July the mid-term meeting of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Staff Exchanges project BETTERXPS was held at Imperial College, London, UK. We are a proud member of the consortium, which aims to enable and encourage the more widespread use of computational methods in the interpretation of experimental XPS spectra.

Day 1 of the meeting was a scientific symposium covering both theoretical and experimental aspects of photoelectron spectroscopy from the partner academic and research institutions, our industrial partners ScientaOmicron and SPECS, as well as external invited speakers, including Dr Laura Ratcliff from the University of Bristol and Dr Dorothea Golze from TU Dresden. It was also great to see many colleagues from the UK PES community who could attend the day and contribute to the discussions.

Participants of the Scientific Meeting on Day 1 of the mid-term review at Imperial College


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How to mitigate radiation damage? Exploring the dark side

Investigating discontinuous X-ray irradiation as a damage mitigation strategy for [M(COD)Cl]2 catalysts
N. K. Fernando, C. A. Murray, A. L. Thompson, K. Milton, A. B. Cairns, and A. Regoutz, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 27, 9417, 2025.

Radiation-induced changes have become an aspect of everyday life for many of us who use X-ray based techniques. With the ever increasing photon flux and ever decreasing beam footprints of laboratory and synchrotron systems radiation damage is becoming an increasing challenge for material characterisation using techniques such as X-ray spectroscopy and diffraction.

In our most recent exploration into this topic, led by Dr Nathalie Fernando, we explored a possible mitigation strategy, where short, X-ray-free “dark” periods are introduced in-between measurement windows. However, it is unclear whether this strategy helps to minimises radiation-induced damage or, in actuality, promotes it through a phenomenon called “dark progression”, i.e. the increase or progression of radiation damage that occurs after the X-ray beam is turned off. This work is now published in the RSC journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.


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Laying the groundwork for optoelectronic devices – the influence of stabiliser concentration on the formation of In2O3 thin films

The influence of stabiliser concentration on the formation of In2O3 thin films
A. A. Riaz, C. Kalha, M. Basso, M. Furedi, and A. Regoutz, Journal of Materials Chemistry C, 13, 177, 2025.

In2O3 is the parent oxide semiconductor for many transparent conducting oxides owing to its comparatively wide band gap and reasonable conductivity. The ability to fabricate thin films of In2O3 utilising simple and cheap solution-processed methods such a sol-gel has made it appealing for applications in displays and solar cells. The use of stabilisers in sol-gel synthesis is prevalent in current research to maintain the solution stability over time and facilitate the formation of strong M–O–M bonds. However, understanding the fundamentals behind the chemistry, especially the effect of varying the stabiliser concentration, is essential and often overlooked.

In our paper published in RSC Journal of Materials Chemistry C and led by Aysha Riaz, we show the impact on the quality of In2O3 thin films when altering the concentration of monoethanolamine used as a stabiliser. Utilising a combination of characterisation techniques such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, and ellipsometry to probe the chemistry of the thin films and UV-visible and infrared spectroscopy to follow the solution chemistry, the optimum stabiliser ratio concentration was determined.

This is the first first author research paper of Aysha’s PhD, with hopefully more to follow! Curran Kalha and Maria Basso provided support and training and the ellipsometry data were collected with the help of Máté Füredi.


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Connecting the dots in metal dihydrides

Over the past couple of years, we have worked hard on a (new to us) material family: transition metal dihydrides. These material are crucial for applications in hydrogen-related technologies, such as energy storage, hydrogen compression, and hydrogen sensing.

In a recently published work led by Curran, we developed a new analytical pathway to explore the relationship between chemical bonding, electronic structure and formation enthalpy of two prototypical metal dihydrides (yttrium and titanium dihydride).
Using hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (HAXPES) at beamline P22 at PETRA III/DESY and by taking advantage of the tunability of synchrotron radiation, we created a non-destructive depth profile of the chemical states. We could provide a description of the bonding nature and the role of d versus sp contributions to states near the Fermi through combination of experimental valence-band spectra and insights from density functional theory (DFT) calculations, the latter was led by Dr Laura Ratcliff from the University of Bristol. Excitingly, we could determine the enthalpy of formation from both theoretical and experimental values of the energy position of metal s-band features close to the Fermi energy.

We were extra excited to see our work being highlighted by the National Research Council of Italy in a recent press release.


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Work selected as Diamond Science Highlight

A study led by Maria Basso, a PhD student at the University of Padova, Italy, who visited the group for six months in 2022, has been selected as a Science Highlight by Diamond Light Source. Maria spent her time in the group working on developing a sol-gel dip-coating approach to vanadium dioxide films and their characterisation with a number of techniques, including laboratory and synchrotron-based X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. During her stay with us, she was able to join one of our beamtimes at beamline I09 at Diamond and we found a bit of spare time to run some of the samples made at UCL. This provided complementary information to the more surface-sensitive data collected in our system at UCL. You can read the full manuscript here.


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Collaboration with Jerry Heng’s Group

Curran welcomed PhD student Ethan Errington from Jerry Heng’s group (Imperial College London, Chemical Engineering Dep.) to the Department of Chemistry for some XPS experiments on their group’s latest samples. Jerry Heng’s group are interested in using XPS to better understand the surface chemistries of oil-in-water adsorbants. This marks the first collaboration between the groups, and we are thrilled to be providing our XPS expertise! Ethan and Curran first met each other 8 years ago when they both studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Leeds. They have both come a long way since their last collaboration which was designing a heat exchanger in their second year of their undergraduate degree.