Surface Characterization Techniques

The chemical, physical, and morphological features of surfaces play a very crucial role in material properties including wettability, optical, adhesive, mechanical, and so on. Therefore, diagnosis of surface structures is very important for materials science. The properties of natural and fabricated material surfaces can be determined using characterization techniques. This chapter discusses some of the most common characterization methods. X-ray florescent spectroscopy technique is a powerful and sensitive technique as it allows fast and accurate qualitative as well as quantitative determination of elements. Infrared (IR) spectroscopy is one of the classical methods used as a characterization technique to explore chemical bonds in surface atoms in many research areas, includings organic and inorganic chemistry, solid state physics, material science, biotechnology, biomedical engineering, biophysics, biochemistry, and pharmacy. Terahertz time domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) is a powerful technique and it is widely used in material characterization, biomedical research, imaging, security and communication applications.