[sdpd] Recent Congress and comiing ones about SDPD

[Armel Le Bail <alb...@cristal.org>]

Hi,

Past congress :

- AFC 2003, Caen, France, July 2003

- ECM21, Durban, South Africa, August 2003
Not everybody happy about the selection of Durban, a place
quite in the south of Europe ;-)...
Anyway, there are no runners (rhinoceros) in liberty in Europe,
so see some pictures at :
                 http://www.cristal.org/ecm21/index.html
Next ECMs will not be as exotic.

- SSPD03, Stara-Lesna, Slovakia, September 2003
The high Tatras seen upside down were used for demonstrating
potential holes during simulated annealing process.
See also some pictures at :
                http://www.cristal.org/sspd03/index.html
Interesting there is a traditional wedding, try fo identify the
participants, you will be surprised ;-).

GENERAL REPORT on the 3 above meetings :
I would say that "realizing the obvious" is the characteristic
of these recent years (provocative opinion may decide some
to answer ;-) :
   - pushing the limits of SDPD by transforming powder data into
     single-crystal-like data (using texture, anisotropic thermal
     expansion, anomalous scattering).
Or realizing progress by reexamining old ideas with modern
instrumentation and new algorithms.

Most of these studies/experiments are realized at synchrotron facilities.
People using conventional X-ray will use such texture or anisotropic
thermal expansion effects in their labs as soon as software will
be available for multipattern intensity extraction. So where are
these software available (Lachlan, please add a new topic in the
CCP14) ? I was said that Fullprof can do it, but this does not
seem to be documented in the manual (??). Beartex software for
texture ? The Pawley choice leads to huge matrices of which
fortunately only the close diagonal is really useful. Using
iterations of the Rietveld decomposition formula (LB method) on
a multi-pattern system may need to find some tricky algorithm in
order to provide the final intensities.. With both methods, the
strict overlapping due to the symmetry cannot be resolved in
the case of anisotropic thermal expansion data.

A software seems to emerge from the mass of Monte Carlo/
simulated annealing/ genetic algorithm structure solution
programs : FOX. The number of applications seems to
increase very fast, as deduced from the number of posters
citing it.


Please, if you were at the Denver conference or at ACA or at the
Summer School on Polycrystalline Structure Determination by
Direct Methods (4 - 7th September 2003, Krakow, Poland) make
a report.


Future congress involving SDPD - they are numerous :

- PPXRD-3, Pharmaceutical Powder X-ray Diffraction Symposium 3
23-25 February 2004
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, U.S.A.
                   www.icdd.com/ppxrd

- ECM-22 Budapest, Hungary, August 25-31, 2004
                   www.ecm22.mtesz.hu

- <http://www.xray.cz/epdic>EPDIC<http://www.xray.cz/epdic>-IX, European 
Powder Diffraction Conference, Prague,
Czech Republic, September 2 - 5 2004

- Something planned in Egypt on SDPD in September 2004 (??).

- Etc, Etc.

Is that not too much ??

Will try to wait Florence 2005 before to buy a new airplane ticket for
discussing SDPD ;-). Never thought of a Web conference ? We have
a continuous forum with the Rietveld and SDPD mailing lists. Not
enough used by experts in my opinion. The Web is less attractive
than being in person in South Africa or Slovakia, for sure...

Best,

Armel


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