Silicate and Fe compound melts are major constituents of the interior of the Earth and rocky planets and have a strong impact on their evolution and properties. Despite this importance, information on properties of such melts at in-situ conditions are still scarce. Main reasons for this are, that these melts are not directly accessible and that experiments at in-situ conditions are extremely...
X-ray total scattering (TS), and its Fourier transform the pair distribution function (PDF), has become the method of choice for determining structural disorder within materials since the advent of high-energy synchrotron X-ray diffractometers. To date these techniques have not transferred to XFEL facilities because of their more modest (< 20 keV) beam energies. This is slowly changing, and...
Recently emerging as the next generation semiconductor materials strongly impacting photovoltaics and other relevant technological sectors, lead halide perovskites, LHPs, [APbX3, A = Cs+, CH3NH3+ (methylammonium, MA) or CH(NH2)2+, formamidinium, FA; X = Cl- , Br-, I-] have also been disruptive in the field of colloidally synthesized semiconducting nanocrystals. Bright and narrowband (< 100...
X-ray crystallography on macromolecular compounds has seen significant progress through X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) studies (Chapman et al., 2011, 2014; Schlichting, 2015). This is, among other things, because the short pulse durations of serial femtosecond crystallography essentially remove all effects of beam damage and atomic motion, and because the extreme brilliance reduces the...
The atomic pair distribution function method is growing in popularity as an approach for studying local structure in nanomaterials, amorphous materials, moleculare materials and liquids, as well as a growing interest in the study of local symmetry breaking in bulk crystals. It is a direct measure of the local structure in the vicinity of an atom. As such, it is a very interesting...
The Pair Distribution Function (PDF) method interprets Total Scattering data in real space [1]. This distinguishes local structure from the long-range average using information contained within diffuse scattering. xFEL facilities provide the potential to apply this tool to pump-probe experiments and local structural dynamics on the native (sub-)picosecond response timescale of a material. ...
