Surface EXAFS yields bond sites

Extended x‐ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS), a powerful source of information about the immediate environment of selected atoms in systems without long‐range order, is now being exploited for the study of surfaces. Using the high‐intensity x‐ray beams produced by synchrotron radiation from SPEAR, the $e+e−$ storage ring at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), groups from Bell Labs and Stanford have recently been able to determine with high precision the bond lengths and adsorption sites of fractional monolayers of atoms adsorbed onto various substrate surfaces.