I just got home from Switzerland, once again, this time from a beamtime at the DMC powder diffractometer, where I was measuring on one of our LCO+O single crystal samples, in order to map out part of reciprocal space (both for the crystal aligned in the cb- and the ab-plane). It was some really cool measurements, and I think I’ve already found the front page image for my thesis!

I actually started out the trip with starting up a beam time at the RITA-II instrument, where a YMnO₃ sample were to be investigated. That was also really exciting – and that experiment continued during my own DMC beam time as well (sadly I didn’t have time to follow it all the way though, but their results looked really cool!).

Some of the students from the neutron scattering course were down there with us, to follow the two experiments. That was really fun, but I hadn’t expected how hard it was to help them to understand everything, when I didn’t even understand half of it myself! Usually beam times are really tiring, but this really took the price!

Group picture

Preparations for experiment

Swiss Light Source

SLS inside

RITA-II

Crane

Tour

Trash

Sample stick

Explaining things

Odd angles

Learning

Fine work

Frozen

The DMC data weren’t really the most perfect data to do structure refinement from (in the cb-plane we only got 12 structural peaks, and some of them were of really bad resolution), but we saw some cool temperature dependencies, and already have some new proposals out for TriCS and other instruments in order to explore those things more. We also got a friendly beam time of two days at the new EIGER instrument, which will be really cool to work with.

This trip also marked the end of the neutron course, although I still need to correct a few reports, and help a few more of the students with their final project. But all in all, it’s been fun teaching in the course, even though it has been quite hard at some times!