Deblurring our View of Atomic Arrangements in Complex Materials Novel materials will impact our society in new and exceptional ways. Imagine, for instance, a material that is transparent with an exceptionally low thermal conductivity: it could be used as a window that completely blocks radiated heat from sunlight during summer and traps all the heat… Read More NSF funded project takes off at Columbia: DMREF: Deblurring our View of Atomic Arrangements in Complex Materials for Advanced Technologies

Analysis of atomic pair distribution function (PDF) has been widely applied and many wonderful results were obtained. However, studies on organic materials haven’t been practically feasible. The major difficulty is to maintain the molecular geometry during refinement. A method towards the solution and refinement of organic crystal structure are developed. By considering constraints on molecular… Read More Towards solution and refinement of organic crystal structures by fitting to the atomic pair distribution function

Scientists are becoming increasingly interested in materials that have local structure at the nanoscale, and the pair distribution function (PDF) technique has become a popular tool to study these materials. To obtain the PDF from experimental data, the diffraction intensity I(Q) is first properly corrected and normalized to the total scattering function S(Q), and then Fourier transformed… Read More xPDFsuite: Quick, Friendly and Compact