An official website of the United States government
Here’s how you know
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (
) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.
https://www.nist.gov/people/bruce-d-ravel
Bruce D. Ravel (Fed)
Physicist
Research Interests
Method development in the field of X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) and related inner-shell spectroscopies, including development of novel measurement techniques and detector technologies
Development of software tools for XAS data acquisition, processing, and analysis
Application of XAS to a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Along with materials science interests in the areas of ferroelectrics and strongly correlated electron systems, I have applied XAS measurements to a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including the environmental sciences, the interpretation of astronomical spectra, the study of objects of cultural heritage, and many others.
Figure 1: The Beamline for Materials Measurement (BMM, 06-BM) at the National Synchrotron Light Source II. BMM is NIST's beamline for X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy and X-ray Diffraction and will begin operations in late 2017.
Figure 2: Screenshots of software for XAS data processing and analysis written by Bruce Ravel. On the left is Athena, a program for reducing and processing measured XAS data. In the middle is Artemis, a program for quantitative analysis of the Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (EXAFS). on the right is Hephaestus, a periodic table for X-ray Absorption spectroscopist. This software is used by scientists worldwide and is cited in the scientific literature over 500 times per year.
Postdoctoral Research Opportunities
Synchrotron-based X-ray absorption spectroscopy is used in conjunction with novel theory and analysis methods to develop, understand, and optimize materials for microelectronics, catalysis, energy science, and other fields. Materials that can be investigated cover all forms of condensed matter from monolayer films to the bulk, from crystalline to highly disordered. These studies offer the opportunity to develop and utilize world-class X-ray instrumentation and detectors.
Professional Service
Member of the IUCr Commission on XAFS, 2014-2023
Chair of the spectroscopy Proposal Review Panel for NSLS-II. Member of proposal review panels for synchrotron facilities worldwide, including the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) and the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), SPring-8 in Japan, Elettra in Italy, the Canadian Light Source, and SESAME in Jordan.
Joseph Woicik, Eric J. Cockayne, Eric L. Shirley, Igor Levin, Conan Weiland, Bruce D. Ravel, A. M. Milinda Abeykoon
We have examined the lattice vibrations and the energy landscape of the isoelectronic diamond and zincblende semiconductor series CuBr, ZnSe, GaAs, and Ge
Bruce D. Ravel, Trevor Tyson, Han Zhang, Sizhan Liu, SANJIT GHOSE, U.J. Idehenre, Yury Barnakov, S.A. Basun, D.R. Evans
Nanoscale BaTiO3 particles (10 nm) prepared by ball-milling a mixture of oleic acid and heptane have been reported to have an electric polarization several
Bruce D. Ravel, Phillip Michael Maffettone, Daniel Allan, Stuart Campbell, Matthew Carbone, Brian DeCost, Howie Joress, Dmitri Gavrilov, Marcus Hanwell, Joshua Lynch, Stuart Wilkins, Jakub Wlodek, Daniel Olds
Multimodal characterization is commonly required for understanding materials. User facilities possess the infrastructure to perform these measurements, albeit