Simultaneous Raman-X-ray Diffraction/Absorption Studies for the In Situ Investigation of Solid-State Transformations and Reactions at Non-Ambient Conditions

 

 

  held on 18th and 19th of June 2008 at the ESRF (Grenoble, France)

Program
Abstracts

A workshop has been organized by SNBL to discuss the recent advances in the combination of diffraction and spectroscopy techniques and to explore the new possibilities opened together with possible future improvements. 78 participants from both academia and industry attended the workshop. The participants, coming from 14 countries divided over all continents, created a very stimulating, constructive and friendly environment for exchanging both scientific and technical know-how and creating new ideas.

The complementarities of Raman scattering to diffraction and absorption techniques have been discussed to show how to exploit this extra dimension in the in situ simultaneous experiments. Scientific cases in the field of Materials Science, Geophysics, Zeolite Chemistry, Solid State Chemistry, Catalysis, and Biology have been reported, together with an overview of the fundamentals of Raman scattering theory and the description of the available instrumentations at SNBL at ESRF and other synchrotron beam lines. The need to combine techniques became with every presentation more and more obvious to anyone in the audience. Many of the presented studies were performed under complex and multiple external stimuli making it impossible to reliably reproduce experiments on individual machines with the in situ but separate approach. The simultaneous approach has matured to a level that a recurrent detailed discussion on the obtained scientific results becomes desirable. After the success of this workshop, the announcement that a follow up workshop will organized by researchers working at SOLEIL in 2010 was hence welcomed by the participants.

To have a record of the main results of the workshop, five papers were selected to be representative of the combination of Raman with both XRD and XAS, with case studies spanning from high temperature to high pressure and samples coming from materials and life science. We strongly believe that all scientists will benefit from this collection. We would like to express our gratitude to all of the authors for contributing to this special issue.

Booklet
Report