Seminars Archive

Chemical Crystallography at synchrotron sources: challenges and opportunities.

Abstract
Chemical crystallography has been used for years as a method for identifying solid compounds and for the determination of crystal structures. With the increasing degree of automation and the recent developments concerning diffraction methods, detectors and sample handling techniques, crystallography is seeing a slow but steady disappearance from science curricula and a transformation in a black-box side-technique. If scientists are interested in continuing asking themselves “how‿ and “why‿ the systems they are interested in are working, maybe they could consider that crystallography has gone some steps further in dealing with structure-properties relationship, deriving molecular properties or getting fine details on structural changes. Synchrotron radiation has been a vital tool to push the limits and expand the boundaries of x-ray crystallography in these directions and few examples will be shown to illustrates the improvements.