Materials Science and Element Strategy Initiative at KEK-Photon Factory

The Photon Factory (PF) of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) was Japan’s first synchrotron radiation facility with support for the X-ray region, successfully generating synchrotron radiation in 1982. The PF can employ X-rays having lower energy than those at SPring-8 and preserves its international competitiveness today through continual work on improvements toward leveraging this advantage.

The PF participates in numerous national projects, one of which is the Element Strategy Initiative. Staff members at the PF have joined research projects at the Tokodai Institute for Element Strategy (TIES) and the Elements Strategy Initiative Center for Magnetic Materials (ESICMM) as principal investigators and have put much effort into evaluating and analyzing new materials, establishing material concepts, and developing techniques for evaluating materials. In TIES, we are working to develop materials called electrides. Through photoemission spectroscopy experiments at the PF, we have clarified that the theoretically predicted electron states are actually being realized. This research will be useful in developing new catalysts for ammonia synthesis. In the meantime, the PF is also working on developing methods for evaluating materials. Although thin films account for many of the electronic materials, to date there has been very little effort to develop methods for precisely analyzing the structures of thin films. A technique for analyzing the structures of thin films could be established by performing X-ray diffraction experiments with a special transmission configuration while accumulating various basic data such as precise absorption corrections, data collected from multiple measurement points, and the separation of reflections off the base. KEK offers other quantum beams in addition to synchrotron X-rays. In research on hydrogen-doped iron-based superconductors, we were able not only to obtain detailed information on the crystal structure using synchrotron radiation, but also to determine rapidly the magnetic structure using neurons and the ratio of magnetic and nonmagnetic phases using muons. This type of multi-probe materials research will likely continue to grow in importance. With this ability to rapidly perform precise measurements and analyses using synchrotron radiation, neutrons, muons, and positrons in collaboration with the Materials Synthesis and Processing Group and the Electronic Theory and Computation Group at ESICMM, we hope that the utilization of quantum beams will prove useful in materials development.

39 stations are in operation at PF, and 8 at PF-AR (Advanced Ring)