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Frankfurt Airport

16
Jul
2017
ICNS in Daejeon, South Korea

ICNS in Daejeon, South Korea

This last week I’ve been in South Korea for the ICNS (International Neutron Scattering Conference), held in Daejeon. It was an amazing trip, and a great conference – and I have a million pictures to sort through now! I’ll share some of them here.

Helsinki layover

I had a 7 hours layover in Helsinki Airport on my way there, so I tried to make the best of it by taking a little sightseeing tour to the city. I’ve never flown via Helsinki before, so it was nice to get this opportunity with a little extra time to spend. I had time enough to take the train into the center of the city, and then walk along some of the beautiful old streets and parks down to the harbour with the markets and all of the little ferries. I then went – with one of the ferries – to the island Suomenlinna, where I walked around for a few hours to see the beautiful sights and views, before I took the ferry back, and then went towards the airport again. I could see myself returning to Finland again, to see the rest of the city, as well as the surrounding land. 

The conference

The conference itself went from Sunday July 9 – with a little welcome ceremony – to Thursday July 13. There were lots of company and institute presentations in one of the large halls, and the sheer number of parallel sessions in many different locations were overwhelming at times.

There were several poster sessions mixed in throughout the week, and I got to present my poster Tuesday in the long lunch break. I don’t think I’ve ever had a poster presentation be that busy and satisfying at the same time. Several people came to talk with me about my poster, and I got plenty of feedback on my work, and even a few new contacts. I had my phone on the poster, just as I tested out during the last DanScatt meeting, and I think it did the trick to draw attention from people.

Tuesday we got to visit the High-Flux Advanced Neutron Application Reactor (HANARO) a short bus drive away from the conference center. They are currently on shutdown, and have been for a while – so we got the rare opportunity to go inside the outer containment to see the beam ports and guides right up close and personal. That was extremely interesting, and I’m very glad that I got to go. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures within the research complex, and were even made to sign agreements about this and put stickers on our phone cameras before the bus transported us to the site. However, one of the conference photographers were there to take pictures of us!

HANARO tour group picture

The whole pile of us visiting HANARO, before we went back to the conference venue

The conference banquet was held Wednesday evening, with entertainment by a traditional Nanta performance – a group of entertainers that did all kinds of dancing and fighting and music with food and cooking utensils. It was really funny and impressive at the same time, and a super great choice for our group of very mixed nationalities.

Poster prize

The poster prizes were awarded on Thursday evening, during the closing ceremony. I had signed up to have my poster evaluated for a prize, but was not too hopeful – with how extremely many posters were presented at the many poster sessions. I ended up winning one of the 12 prizes though, which was amazing!

Included with the prize was also a €100 voucher for books from SpringerNature. On top of that, this diploma is nicer looking than both my bachelor’s and master’s diplomas…

You can see the poster itself on my poster page if you’re interested.

Exploring Daejeon

Unfortunately I did not have eons of time to explore the surrounding city during the week, but we did go out to find some local restaurants and to see the beautiful river front right behind the conference center. The weather was sweltering hot and humid, and I even had problems with the insides of my camera fogging up when I took it out of the bag several times – so I did not get many pictures as I wanted. We did, however, get some absolutely delicious food, and that I got pictures of!
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02
Jun
2017
DanScatt 2017 meeting in Odense

DanScatt 2017 meeting in Odense

Yesterday and today I’ve been in Odense for the yearly meeting for DanScatt, the organization for Danish users of synchrotron- and neutron-sources and free-electron X-ray lasers. This time it was held at SDU (Syddansk Universitet), just like the first time I joined the meeting back in 2012.

There were plenty of talks, and also a poster session about scattering – I got to present some of my LSCO superstructures with a poster. I had some fun testing out a new idea I got for the poster I will be presenting later this Summer in South Korea at the ICNS conference, where I want to put my phone or tablet onto the poster (at least during the actual poster session). I used my phone this time, with animations of some of my reciprocal space data. It worked out really well, and functioned as a good eyecatcher for the poster.

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03
Sep
2016
Back from the ECM-30 meeting in Basel

Back from the ECM-30 meeting in Basel

During this week, I was in Basel to participate in the 30th meeting of the European Crystallographic Association (ECM) – the first time for me to participate in this conference. There were way more people than I had expected – I heard mentioned around 920 participants – and the whole thing was super inspiring.

I had actually tried getting a talk about my almost-ready to publish work on staging in LSCO, but I only got to present a poster. I did, however, get to catch up with a few people, as well as meet some of the people that I met at the Aperiodic Crystals school back a few weeks ago in Antwerp.

Monday evening there was a Young Crystallographers Mixer at the Bar Rouge in the second-highest building in Basel. The view was amazing, the drinks were great, and the music was loud. Quite a fun experience, although I’m not sure whether it worked well for networking or not..

Tuesday evening I got to visit the new Dectris headquarters in Baden-Daettwil, with a really interesting tour, as well as some awesome barbecue to top it off afterwards. It was really cool to see where they make the Pilatus detectors that I’ve seen so many times, as well as hear about all of the newer products they have been developing, and the history of the company.

The venue itself was really great, and there was a professional team of conference arrangers that took care of the practicals – everything ran so smoothly! We also had some pretty long lunch breaks, so there was good opportunity to get around Basel a bit. I might actually go to Basel again on a vacation some day, it was a great city – and the public transport was very efficient.

Finally, the conference dinner on Wednesday evening was held in the Zoo in Basel, in one of the big restaurant halls. Before the actual dinner (which was awesome, by the way), we were divided into groups and sent on tours around the Zoo. I got on the tour in their little aquarium, where one of the biologists showed us around in the back, where they breed corals, seahorses, and jellyfish. It was super interesting, and way too short. I could have stayed there for hours and hours.
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07
Jul
2016
Aperiodic Crystals school in Antwerp

Aperiodic Crystals school in Antwerp

This last week I participated in the Aperiodic Crystals school held at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. It was a week of lectures and tutorials on modulated crystal structures and quasicrystals, and was basically perfectly catered for what I need for my continued PhD project.

Apart from learning a bunch of useful knowledge about superspace and superstructures, I also got some more knowledge about how to use JANA2006 to solve (in)commensurately modulated structures from single crystal data. Now I just have to figure out how to index the data that I already have…

The week ended up being super busy for me, but there was some time in the evenings to go out with people, finding interesting local beer and food. I was especially happy about finally trying cherry beer (kriek), which I’d never even heard of before. I also got to meet a lot of new awesome people, both fellow participants of the school and lecturers – some of which I’ll meet again soon at the ECM-30 conference in Basel at the end of August.
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31
May
2016

Swedish Neutron Scattering Society meeting in Lund

I went to the annual Swedish Neutron Scattering Society meeting held in Lund, Sweden, this year – on Monday May 30th and Tuesday May 31st – to kind of get a feel for what is happening on the other side of the water from here in Copenhagen. I got to listen to a lot of interesting talks – many of them centered around instrument development for ESS and MAX IV – as well as present a poster on some of my more recent work.

On Tuesday we went on a tour to the almost finished MAX IV synchrotron, as well as the ESS – still in the building phase. It was super interesting to see both!

On my trips (I went back and forth by train over Øresund both days) I had some fun taking little video clips, finally resulting in a little video:

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05
Dec
2014
My first beamtime at ESRF

My first beamtime at ESRF

We were lucky to get a few days of beamtime on the hard X-ray instrument ID11 on the ESRF in Grenoble, France: from December 1st to 3rd. We measured reflections for several of our LSCO crystals at different temperatures, to get some of the beautiful superstructures in even better resolution that before.

A little look at what the data taking looked like:

I also got to see the mountains surrounding Grenoble from a new direction – I’d never all the way down south by the synchrotron on campus, and had no idea that there was a little roundabout down there either. Either way though, the view was awesome on the days we had sunshine!

A little panorama from ESRF

A little panorama from ESRF

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29
Nov
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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16
Nov
2013
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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16
Jul
2013
ICNS in Edinburgh, Scotland

ICNS in Edinburgh, Scotland

I have been in Scotland since July 7, and just got home yesterday. A large flock of us from my group went together to the International Conference for Neutron Scattering (ICNS) at the Edinburgh International Conference Center. Several of us also attended the Science & Scientists @ ESS satellite conference, which was arranged on Monday at the university.

The welcome reception was held at Dynamic Earth – with their cool white tent-like structure – and an amazing view towards Arthur’s Seat in the warm evening. It was so full of all of the conference participants, but a great place to see nevertheless – and it forced us all to take a rather long walk through the main part of the city, which was a wonderful start to the trip, to be honest.

At the actual conference center, when we got our materials handed out, they gave us umbrellas – expecting a normal Scottish Summer, I’m assuming. However, it seems like they jinxed the rain with all of those hundreds of umbrellas, as we got only beautiful warm days with lots of sunshine for the whole week. For once the weather gods were agreeable! To my delight, that also meant plenty of time (even in the evenings after it got dark) for me to wander around and take pictures. Edinburgh is a beautiful city!

During the poster session on the afternoon of Wednesday, I was busy presenting a poster about some of my LSCO+O superstructures. I did not have too many people come over, but at least a few was fine for me. We had a poster about our VNT e-learning neutron scattering project to present as well, so that was interesting.

Also Wednesday, there was a small reception-type-thing held as a private event up in the castle, which was absolutely mind-blowing! There was wine and little mini-haggis, and we could all mill about and see the crown jewels, and other little treasures they had hidden away in the chambers of the beautiful old buildings. What I loved the most, though, was the view as we walked up to the castle. You can see the whole city from there, and the weather was perfect as well!

The conference dinner Friday evening was held inside of the National Museum of Scotland, and what an absolutely beautiful place that was as well!

Oh, and we also had the pleasure of seeing Kim juggling not just balls, but also apples!

Saturday we took some time to go to Arthur’s Seat and enjoy yet another awesome view of the city. It was quite the hike, and I ended up not going all the way up there – but it was still beautiful!

Arthur's Seat

The view from Arthur’s Seat was spectacular

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04
Jul
2013
Some extra time on IN12

Some extra time on IN12

Since some of our last beamtime on the inelastic neutron instrument IN12 was wasted because of missing and non-prepared equipment, we got an extra piece of beam time, continuing the last experiment we did there in May. We had from June 30th to July 3rd, although the first day was really only to check the alignment on the sample – while the last day was only until the early morning.

More cool airport visits!

On my way home, I had to switch planes in the Charles de Gaulle airport, which I’ve never done before. What interesting architecture they have! And there were security guards and police on segways, I’ve never seen that before…
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15
Jun
2013
Nordic Physics Days in Lund, Sweden

Nordic Physics Days in Lund, Sweden

Between Wednesday and Friday this week, a number of us from the group have been in Lund to participate in the Nordic Physics Days held at the university there.

I got to present a poster with a few status updates on my LSCO+O superstructures project, and I tried making it a little more general – for a general physicist audience instead of an audience of specialized crystallographers. One of the steps to do that, was to make the title more fun – so I named it “Superstructures in a superoxygenated superconductor”, which I felt was maybe enough “super”. I also gave it the subtitle “An ongoing study of the high-temperature superconductor La\(_2\)CuO\(_{4+y}\)”, just in case someone wanted to actually know what was going on…

On Thursday, we also got to go on a little tour to visit the Max IV build site. It was extremely cool to see how they’ve started doing things on site, even though they haven’t gotten that far yet. At least you can actually kind of see the ring coming into shape!

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19
May
2013
Beam time on IN12

Beam time on IN12

From May 11 to 17, I’ve been at the ILL in Grenoble, France, to do an experiment on the triple-axis neutron instrument IN12, where we did inelastic measurements on one of our LCO+O crystals.

We had to spend a whole day on the OrientExpress instrument to co-align our samples, since there were four of them to be used at the same time… It was a horrible puzzle to get them matching up, but we got it done!

The actual measurements on IN12 was done between May 14 and 17, and despite a lot of problems with some of the instrument components not being delivered on time (wasting us a lot of time in the end), we got some great measurements.

One absolutely awesome thing on this trip, was that one of our local contacts at the ILL managed to give us a little tour of the reactor hall. We got to have a look at all of the neutron instruments inside of the inner instrument hall, and we got to stand above the reactor and see the Cherenkov radiation. It was so beautiful. I’m sorry about not having any pictures for here, but their rules are pretty strict about taking photos…

Some extra photo time in Frankfurt

On the way to France, I had a 4 hour layover between planes in Frankfurt airport, and I took the opportunity to walk around in the huge airport and take pictures of airplanes and fun architecture and decorations.
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14
Apr
2013
Working a couple of weeks at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Working a couple of weeks at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

From April 1st to 13th, I’ve been at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire, England, to work together with the instrument responsible at the SXD instrument. We’ve been working on my data analysis, but the main thing we did was do extra measurements on two different laboratory X-ray diffractometers on small shavings of the same LSCO+O crystal that we had on SXD. These data will help me get an even better overview of my superstructures, since the X-ray instruments can measure for higher \(q\) than what we’ve previously been able to.

The two diffractometers were at ISIS (an Oxford Instruments Gemini diffractometer) and the Harwell Research Complex (an Oxford Instruments SuperNova diffractometer), right on the RAL campus, so it was super convenient. We got so much new data – on several different small pieces of the crystal – and at least some of them have really nice resolution. I can definitely use this further!

The Gemini instrument

The Gemini instrument

I stayed at a cute lille Bed & Breakfast in East Hendred, a short ten minute bus drive from campus. The two cozy pubs provided some awesome meals for my dinners, and I felt super welcome there – I’ll be staying there every time I go to ISIS from now on. The guest house at campus is really, really not worth it compared to this place (it was basically the same price, for a way better room, and way better opportunities for dinner)!

Beautiful London

On the first day, on my way to Oxfordshire, I took a little detour and spent a few hours in London. It’s the first time I’ve been in the city, and I spent my time walking around, mostly along the Thames – visiting the typical tourist spots like Elizabeth Tower, Trafalgar Square, the Tower Bridge, the Gherkin, and the Millenium Bridge at St. Paul’s Cathedral. I had a great time, and I’ll definitely return one day to have a look at some of the less visited places!

A little side trip to Oxford

I spent one of my days working at the Bed & Breakfast in the morning, and then taking a short trip to Oxford in the afternoon. I visited some of the old colleges and had coffee and pecan pie at one of the (if not the) oldest coffee shops in Europe – Queen’s Lane Coffee House. I used one of those hop-on-hop-off tourist bus things, and they drove us around and explained how things used to work in the old days of the city. It was really interesting!

I stopped at the botanical gardens and had an ice cream while enjoying the beautiful Spring flowers. I also went to see the beautiful Renaissance dining hall at the Christ Church college, where they filmed the Harry Potter Hogwarts dining hall scenes: despite the long line and too many people, it was kind of fun to see.

Weekend trip to bird-of-prey park and Stonehenge

On Sunday, April 7th, the local contact took me on a trip to a bird-of-prey park and Stonehenge, just to get out and do something, instead of sitting at the Bed & Breakfast working all weekend. It was super cool – and I’m really glad he suggested it!
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31
Mar
2013
Back from Neutron Scattering Software Workshop in Berlin

Back from Neutron Scattering Software Workshop in Berlin

After the ADD workshop at the ILL in France, I went to Germany, to participate in yet another workshop in Berlin. This time the theme of the workshop was software for neutron scattering, and I learned so much. A bunch of software developers, as well as researchers interested in software, showed up, and there were so many great discussions and presentations of software and what is needed of software. I also got ample opportunities to network a bunch, so that was great.

I found a little time – on the evening of the last day – to go to Alexanderplatz, where there was a market going on. They had music and tonnes of little cute booths selling sausages and all kinds of sweet foods. They also had some pretty silly music going on (see the video further down if you care).

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23
Mar
2013
ADD2013 workshop at ILL

ADD2013 workshop at ILL

During the last week, I’ve been in France, participating in the ADD workshop at the ILL in Grenoble. It has been a week of tutorials and lectures on different programs and methods that are used for real-space analysis of diffraction data. I got to test out the PDFgui program, which was interesting – since I’d heard about it at the conference in Santa Fe last October.

I got to present a poster as well, but simply used the same poster as the one I presented at the Flipper workshop back in January. I still did not get much of a response in terms of ideas on how to refine my superstructures, but did get plenty of friendly – although slightly unoptimistic – encouragement to continue my work. Sigh.

I also got a bit of time in the evenings to go explore Grenoble, and I found myself getting on the cable cars to the Bastille on top of one of the mountains surrounding the city. The view from up there was spectacular!

When I was done exploring and wandering around, I took the cable car down – and basically got the whole thing to myself. That prompted me to record the descent, with the view of the city in the early sunset – so if you’re interested, have a look at the video below!

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