The research activities on material characterization focus on fundamental aspects and applications by employing photo thermal (PT) methods. Thermo-optical characterization play a key role in many important areas ranging from condensed matter, chemistry, environmental, industrial process surveillance, agriculture to medical diagnostics. We address the issues of PT science by basic research on spectroscopic data and algorithms for data analysis, and by development and implementation of novel laser sources and novel concepts in combination with various detection schemes. Much of the current effort in the group has been devoted to photoacoustic and photothermal spectroscopy experiments. Photothermal spectroscopies based on the mirage effect and other photothermal phenomena have been shown to be very sensitive tools in measuring the optical properties of material systems. Photothermal deflection spectroscopy (PDS) has been successfully developed in our laboratory. Extensively we now use PAS/PTA for depth profiling of thin-film materials, for example used in solar cells technology, coating layers on crystalline and metal surfaces, as well as PAS for low level metal content determination in environmental studies. Many valuable contributions to the significant and a worldwide progress observed during recent years in the field of photoacoustic science, were made by different research groups. However, potential of newly emerged photoacoustic, photothermal and related techniques for application in the environmental studies has not been fully exploited so far. The proposal research of this group is to investigate the capabilities of PT methods for i) Thin Films thermal and optical non-destructive characterization and ii) Combined PAS Sensing technology in environmental studies.
