Associate Professor
Josh Lipton-Duffin
Faculty of Science,
School of Chemistry & Physics
Biography
I am a career surface scientist, interested in new materials and chemical reactions that occur on surfaces. Much of the very successful theories describing bulk crystalline materials is not applicable on surfaces, because most of our understanding of the solid state start from the assumption that crystal lattices extend very far in all spatial dimensions. Creating a surface throws a wrench into that very basic assumption, and quite often unusual phenomena will occur on surfaces that do not occur in the bulk. Studying surfaces is challenging: in air, a freshly cleaned or cleaved surface will typically be covered in a layer of nitrogen, oxygen or water molecules in a few nanoseconds! Thus, most of my work is done in ultrahigh vacuum, where surfaces remain clean and free of contaminants for hours (or longer); this affords opportunities for performing experiments free of the influence of contaminants or unwanted adsorbates. I spent a lot of time during my PhD (Queen's University, 2006) building bespoke equipment for surface science experiments. I have a passion for instrumentation as well as science, which serves well when a particular tool is unavailable and we are forced to improvise.Personal details
Positions
- Principal Research Fellow
Faculty of Science,
School of Chemistry & Physics
Keywords
Surface science, Scanning probe microscopy, Photoelectron spectroscopy, Synchrotron radiation, Ultrahigh vacuum
Research field
Condensed matter physics, Other physical sciences, Physical chemistry
Field of Research code, Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC), 2020
Qualifications
- PhD (Queen's University at Kingston)
Teaching
I teach into a variety of subjects in physics. At QUT I have been a lecturer for Thermal and Materials physics, Special topics in Surface Science.
Experience
I have nearly 20 years experience in surface science, including vacuum technologies, instrument design, spectroscopy and microscopy. My present research employs as many of these techniques as possible to uncover the structure-function relationship of novel materials; either common substances that are undergoing a "rediscovery", or bespoke materials designed from the ground up. During my MSc and PhD I designed and built an inverse photoemission spectrometer, which at the time represented the state of the art in the technique. Inverse photoemission is an exceptionally slow type of electronic density measurement, whereby electrons from a low-energy source are injected into the unoccupied states of a surface, and the light emitted during their capture is collected and analysed. Later I became an avid user of scanning tunnelling microscopy, a technique whereby a sharp probe is rastered across a surface to build up an image of the sample's topographic and electronic features. STM allows the user to "see" individual atoms and molecules, and is a particularly beguiling measurement, albeit sometimes tedious and not particularly fast compared to electron microscopies. I am also heavily reliant on photoelectron spectroscopy (PES), both in the laboratory (XPS/UPS) and using synchrotron light (SRPES). The synchrotron offers advantages in terms of tunability and flux, and permits experiments such as near-edge x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (NEXAFS), which is a related technique for studying the electronic energy levels and orientation of adsorbed surface species.
Publications
- Di Giovannantonio, M., Tomellini, M., Lipton-Duffin, J., Galeotti, G., Ebrahimi, M., Cossaro, A., Verdini, A., Kharche, N., Meunier, V., Vasseur, G., Fagot-Revurat, Y., Perepichka, D., Rosei, F. & Contini, G. (2016). A mechanistic picture and kinetic analysis of surface-confined Ullmann polymerization. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 138(51), 16696–16702. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/102194
- Di Giovannantonio, M., El Garah, M., Lipton-Duffin, J., Meunier, V., Cardenas, L., Fagot-Revurat, Y., Cossaro, A., Verdini, A., Perepichka, D., Rosei, F. & Contini, G. (2013). Insight into organometallic intermediate and its evolution to covalent bonding in surface-confined Ullmann polymerization. ACS Nano, 7(9), 8190–8198. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/102181
- Dinca, L., Fu, C., MacLeod, J., Lipton-Duffin, J., Brusso, J., Szakacs, C., Ma, D., Perepichka, D. & Rosei, F. (2013). Unprecedented transformation of tetrathienoanthracene into pentacene on Ni(111). ACS Nano, 7(2), 1652–1657. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/89958
- Vasseur, G., Fagot-Revurat, Y., Sicot, M., Kierren, B., Moreau, L., Malterre, D., Cardenas, L., Galeotti, G., Lipton-Duffin, J., Rosei, F. & other, a. (2016). Quasi one-dimensional band dispersion and surface metallization in long-range ordered polymeric wires. Nature Communications, 7, 1–9. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/96437
- Lipton-Duffin, J., Miwa, J., Kondratenko, M., Cicoira, F., Sumpter, B., Meunier, V., Perepichka, D. & Rosei, F. (2010). Step-by-step growth of epitaxially aligned polythiophene by surface-confined reaction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(25), 11200–11204. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/102177
- Lipton-Duffin, J., Ivasenko, O., Perepichka, D. & Rosei, F. (2009). Synthesis of polyphenylene molecular wires by surface-confined polymerization. Small, 5(5), 592–597. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/102176
- Lipton-Duffin, J., MacLeod, J., Vondracek, M., Prince, K., Rosei, R. & Rosei, F. (2014). Thermal evolution of the submonolayer near-surface alloy of ZnPd on Pd(111). Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 16(10), 4764–4770. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/89966
- Dinca, L., De Marchi, F., MacLeod, J., Lipton-Duffin, J., Gatti, R., Perepichka, D. & Rosei, F. (2015). Pentacene on Ni(111): Room-temperature molecular packing and temperature-activated conversion to graphene. Nanoscale, 7(7), 3263–3269. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/84811
- De Marchi, F., Cui, D., Lipton-Duffin, J., Santato, C., MacLeod, J. & Rosei, F. (2015). Self-assembly of indole-2-carboxylic acid at graphite and gold surfaces. Journal of Chemical Physics, 142(10), 1–9. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/89932
- MacLeod, J., Lipton-Duffin, J., Cui, D., De Feyter, S. & Rosei, F. (2015). Substrate effects in the supramolecular assembly of 1,3,5-benzene tricarboxylic acid on graphite and graphene. Langmuir: the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids, 31(25), 7016–7024. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/85668
QUT ePrints
For more publications by Josh, explore their research in QUT ePrints (our digital repository).