Programme coming soon

SCOPE

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The Historical Materials BAG (https://www.esrf.fr/BAG/HistMat), active since 2021, is a facilitated access route to the ESRF’s structural analysis capabilities for the Heritage Science community. It was implemented following the ESRF-EBS upgrade, after the realisation that Heritage Science researchers across universities, research institutes, and museums were all relying on similar synchrotron experiments despite working with disparate materials, particularly regarding the structural analysis of their samples. This BAG targets two complementary analytical configurations at the ESRF: 1) high-angular-resolution XRD at the ID22 beamline, providing information on the bulk crystalline composition of historical samples and enabling the modelling of crystallites in sub-micron particles; and 2) high-spatial-resolution 2D μ-XRD mapping at the ID13 beamline, charting the distribution of crystalline phases in historical samples at the micron scale and allowing the characterisation of complex stratigraphies.

Over the past six years, the BAG has enabled the heritage community to address various scientific questions, including revealing the manufacturing techniques of ancient objects, authenticating artefact composition to detect potential forgeries, identifying degradation processes in ancient materials and assessing the effects of previous restoration treatments, and understanding changes in historical samples when exposed to intense X-ray beams in order to implement safe analysis protocols. In addition to advancing the heritage field, the Historical Materials BAG also participates in projects benefiting the ESRF as a whole, such as developing user-friendly tools for data acquisition and processing, holding workshops to train new users, and collecting open and FAIR data. The latter of these efforts supported the development of a custom interface for collecting metadata about samples analysed during BAG beamtime and is the focus of an ongoing project through the European SHARE initiative, funded by OSCARS, to create an open-access heritage database.

The UDM3, “Heritage Science at the ESRF: Achievements of the Historical Materials BAG and Future Prospects”, is designed not only for the partners and collaborators of the BAG who would like to share their results, but also for all users who are curious about the developments we implement and the methodologies we use. As a complement to this UDM, attendees are encouraged to register for the tutorial, “Jupyter Notebooks for Fast and User-Friendly Rietveld Refinement for μXRD 2D Mapping”, which will present a newly developed workflow for fitting μ-XRD maps.