The fourth “Modern Methods in Rietveld Refinement for Structural Analysis” will be held from June 17-22, 2018, at the Advanced Photon Source of Argonne National Laboratory in close partnership with Bruker-AXS, ANL, and the National Science Foundation.
The primary goal of this school is to teach participants methods for evaluating crystal structures from powder diffraction data with an emphasis on data collected on national user facility beamlines such as the 11-BM, 11-ID-B and 17-BM synchrotron beamlines at the APS at Argonne National Laboratory, the POWGEN and NOMAD time-of-flight neutron diffraction beamlines at the SNS of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the XPD and PDF beamlines at the NSLS-II synchrotron at BNL. This course will emphasize traditional non-molecular solid state compounds and will use the TOPAS software as the platform for Rietveld refinement and other forms of structural analysis (complementary trial license will be provided to participants). The combination of advances in instrumentation and advances in software algorithms now allow many challenging structural problems to be resolved solely from powder diffraction data, and an up-to-date instruction in modern methods of structural analysis will be provided
There will be a special secondary spotlight this year on the integration (using GSAS-II) and analysis of diffraction data collected on the 2D area detectors that are typically used for in situ and in operando measurements. There will be an opportunity for accepted participants to have data collected on their own sample at both synchrotron and neutron beamlines.
Confirmed instructors include Dr. Saul Lapidus (ANL, 11-BM), Dr. Wenqian Xu (ANL, 17-BM), Dr. Karena Chapman (ANL, 11-ID-B), Dr. Robert Von Dreele (ANL), Prof. Peter Khalifah (SBU), Prof. Cora Lind-Kovacs (U. Toledo), Dr. Ashfia Huq (ORNL, POWGEN), and Dr. Nathan Henderson (Bruker-AXS).
There will be no registration fee associated with this course. There are ongoing fundraising efforts to additionally support lodging and meal expenses of Ph.D. and post-doctoral participants in this program. All travel expenses will be the responsibility of participants.
The application and further information about the course are available through the website.
While this course is open to all applicants, priority will be given to Ph.D. students and post-doctoral researchers from North American institutions. Completed applications should be received by April 24, 2018, although later applications may still be considered.