SYNCHROTRON RADIATION BASED CHARACTERIZATION OF COMPLEX MORPHOLOGY CLUSTERS IN THE GAS-PHASE

Cluster science is a rather new and rapidly developing field of research, motivated by concurrent interests at both fundamental and applied level. First of all one can recognize the fascinating fundamental question of how the properties of bulk materials evolve from the corresponding ones of single atoms, but clusters attract great interest also in the ever-growing field of nanotechnology, where they can be employed as building blocks to assemble novel nanostructured materials with interesting properties. To fully understand and eventually control the properties of these materials it is fundamental to reach an insight into the properties of the original particles, without the modifications that are necessarily introduced by the interaction with the supporting surface and between clusters themselves. For this reason it is very interesting to study clusters in the gas-phase, completely isolated from the surrounding environment. Laser optical and photo-electron spectroscopy techniques have proven to be very powerful to characterize the electronic properties of clusters, while the most advanced synchrotron radiation based characterization techniques that offer larger insight for nano-scale objects characterization have found to date only little application to free isolated nanostructures due to the very low density of gas-phase samples. The advent of intense short-wavelength light sources such as the new generation of FELs (Free Electron Lasers) is expected to bridge the gap between the most advanced characterization methods and the state of the art of free particles preparation methods. The combination of such sources to isolated clusters shows a strong additional potential for the observation of new physical phenomena from matter under extreme conditions. This thesis reports on the characterization of carbon and metal clusters with synchrotron radiation based spectroscopic techniques. The developed experimental setup will be presented, along the results obtained on selected systems.