Surface X-ray and Neutron Scattering Workshop
Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory September 23-27, 2002 Organizers: John Ankner (SNS) Sean Brennan (SSRL) Jeff Kortright (LBNL)

A group of 75 scientists met at the Granlibakken Conference Center September 23-27, 2002 near Lake Tahoe, California to discuss the latest results in the field of Surface X-ray and Neutron Scattering. The conference was co-chaired by John Ankner (SNS), Sean Brennan (SSRL) and Jeff Kortright (LBNL) and sponsored by the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) and the Advanced Light Source (ALS), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). This was the seventh in a series of international conferences dating back to 1989, in Marseilles, France which brings together surface scattering experts from around the world. The goal of these conferences has been to explore the commonalities between the two techniques as well as the complementarities. Recent developments in the studies of magnetic surfaces have demonstrated both of these aspects. Many of the talks presented at the conference described new methods with both neutrons and x-rays for studying these surfaces. For the x-ray scatterers, the idea of coding each neutron's incidence angle using its spin was novel and intriguing. The second area of strong overlap amongst the participants is in studies of organic and biological molecules on surfaces. The neutron scatterers make up for the lower brightness of their sources by artificially enhancing the scattering contrast in their samples with deuterium replacing hydrogen in strategic locations. A third area of overlap is in the analysis of the scattering from surfaces and solutions to the "phase problem", which exists when either neutrons or x-rays are scattered from surfaces. There were several exciting talks on this topic, which generally use the interference between scattering from the substrate and scattering from the surface layer to derive the phases of the surface scattering. There were a number of papers which used the coherent properties of the x-ray beam to study the structure of surfaces or materials (especially polymers) on surfaces. The next conference in the series is expected to be held in 2004 near Dortmund, Germany.