Month: November 2013

Another DMC beam time on LSCO+O, and a little PCMO

Another DMC beam time on LSCO+O, and a little PCMO

From November 21 to 28 we had another beam time at the DMC instrument at SINQ, where we measured reciprocal space maps for two of our LSCO+O crystals.

I arrived a couple of days early to align the samples, and had some very late nights because things didn’t want to work – as is seemingly the usual when aligning crystals… If nothing else, I got to entertain myself with how much the sample holders looked like little robots.

The measurements themselves went perfectly, and we had some extra time to put a powder sample of PCMO on the instrument in the end. Hurray for beautiful data to take home!

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Posted by PJR in Experiments, Travel, 0 comments
Introduction to Mantid and Python course

Introduction to Mantid and Python course

Late last night I landed in a plane from London, after a great week at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (RAL) in Oxfordshire, England. I’ve been following a week-long course on the instrument management and data analysis software Mantid, also including some rudimentary introductions to Python. A lot of it was very introductory (which was also the point, I guess), but at least now I have a good feel for how the software can be used both on an instrument and on my own machine for data analysis.

It’s a shame that there is no SXD instrument model in the software yet, so I could work on my time-of-flight data on there – but at least the guys teaching us (the same guys that made the software) were very eager to help people with starting up their own models too. So if I get the time, it seems like I have that option.

I stayed in the same small Bed & Breakfast in East Hendred as last time I was at ISIS (which is also at RAL), although this time I got a room a little outside of town, so I had to walk through their little yard to get to the bus stop. That made for wet shoes from the morning dew, but also some really pretty sunrises!

The little Bed & Breakfast yard made for some spectacular mornings

The little Bed & Breakfast yard made for some spectacular mornings

A little detour to London on the way home

I spent a small part of Friday in London, before going all the way to Heathrow to catch my plane. I went out to the O2 Arena and then the Emirates Air Line. I took the trip back and forth over the water – with some absolutely beautiful views of the city! I also found time to go to Greenwich Park, where the GMT line is located – and I believe that it is a Unesco World Heritage spot too! The park is huge, but I managed to walk up the hill to the Royal Observatory to enjoy the view. You can basically see all of London from up there (that’s shown in the picture at the top of this post)!

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Posted by PJR in Travel, Workshops, schools, and courses, 0 comments

Structural State of Minerals and its Applications course

PhD course on different software used for X-ray scattering (both powders and single crystals), primarily on minerals – held at the Geocenter at the University of Copenhagen. The course addressed the use of the structural information obtained by modern diffraction methods and computational approaches in mineralogy and materials science and was mainly directed towards PhD students in geosciences and related disciplines. I was hoping to learn more about – in particular – superstructures and how to handle them, since these are found in a lot of mineralogical samples.

We spent a lot of time on basics of crystal structures and diffraction – which was a repeat of what I’ve seen a lot already – but then moved on to looking at behaviour of crystals under varying temperature and pressure, powder diffraction and applications and finally structure interpretation and specific applications in geoscience and material science. We had both lectures and experimental work with an introduction to modern diffractometers using one of the X-ray diffractometers at the department. We also got to test out a range of different crystallographic software in short tutorials.

All in all, I’m not sure if I learned much about superstructures that I didn’t already know, and I definitely did not find the holy grail of how to solve my crystal data – but, if nothing else – it was an interesting course with some new knowledge.

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Posted by PJR in Workshops, schools, and courses, 0 comments