Liquid surfaces, having no long-range order, and lacking interesting features like steps, defects etc. have received much less research attention than their solid counterparts.  However, with the advent of powerful synchrotron x-ray sources, over the last two decades a wealth of interesting new effects and structures were discovered at liquid surfaces and in nanometer thick layers over such surfaces.

Time, audience, and the speaker's sore throat permitting, new results will be presented on at least some of the following subjects:

(a) The structure of the free surface of liquid metals and alloys. These show surface-induced layering and unique wetting and segregation effects.

(b) The structure of organic thin films on liquid metal surfaces, where new structural phases and phase transitions were found in nanometer-thick films.

(c) Surface freezing in binary mixtures of chain molecule melts.  This novel effect (almost all other materials show surface melting, not surface freezing) was discovered a decade ago in pure alkane and alcohol melts. In mixtures, new effects like a surface-demixing transition and a universal interchange energy were recently detected.