There are various materials having various properties. Why do they behave differently? I'm working to make it clear from microscopic point of view. By measuring atomic arrangement in 0.01 nm resolution, we learn the origin of the interesting properties of materials.
We use X-ray for such measurements. Synchrotron radiation generated from circular accelerator, whose diameter is about 100 m, is highly useful. I often visit large synchrotron facilities, Photon Factory at Tsukuba-city and SPring-8 in Hyogo prefecture, with my students to perform our experiments. Of course we have our x-ray diffractometer in our lab, which mimics the ones in synchrotron facilities. We sometimes do real research, do preliminary measurements, or train our students with our diffractometer.
Although our technique is limited to x-ray diffraction, we measure various kind of things instead. We have studied transition metal oxides showing interesting properties, but recently we studied the early process of the passivation of iron surfaces and the surface structure of organic semiconductors. Surfaces are interesting because they show many functionalities, such as chemical reactions as well as the transistor activities. We also develop new data analyzing softwares based on the information theory to derive surface structure of materials from surface x-ray diffraction data. We do various things to study physics based on the x-ray diffraction and scattering techniques.