X-ray diffraction scholarships announced

Bruker AXS announced the recipients of its 2006 Excellence in X-ray Diffraction (XRD) scholarships based on unique experiments performed by advanced university students.

During the 2006 Materials Research Society fall meeting at the Hynes Convention Center, Bruker AXS announced the recipients of its 2006 Excellence in X-ray Diffraction (XRD) scholarships based on unique experiments performed by advanced university students.

Recognising academic achievement in X-ray Diffraction, Bruker AXS presented a $5000 scholarship for unique applications in the category of materials science and another $5000 scholarship for the category of geology and chemistry.

The winners were selected by an independent panel of judges: Tom Blanton from Eastman Kodak, Jim Kaduk from Innovene and president of the International Centre for Diffraction Data, Professor Richard Matyi, College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at UAlbany-SUNY, National Research Council Canada Research Officer Pam Whitfield, Associate Professor Scott Misture from Alfred University in New York, and Nattamai Bhuvanesh, Department of Chemistry at Texas A+M University.

Hsiu-Wen Wang of the Indiana University Department of Geological Sciences, Bloomington was awarded the Bruker AXS 2006 Excellence in X- ray Diffraction scholarship for unique applications in the category of geology and chemistry.

The title of her winning paper is 'Dehydration/rehydration induced phase transitions in Natrolite'; She was advised in her research by Professor David Bish of the department of geological sciences, Indiana University.

In accepting her award, she said, "My research involves a detailed study of how the crystal structure of the natural zeolite natrolite changes with temperature and the partial pressure of water.

"Crystal structure determinations using powder X-ray diffraction data are the key to clarify the structural changes responsible for observed symmetry changes and to pinpoint the phase-transition mechanism(s), not only for natrolite but also for other framework silicate minerals".

Natrolite is a tectosilica mineral species belonging to the zeolite group.

Natrolite occurs with other zeolites in the amygdaloidal cavities of basaltic igneous rocks.

The best specimens are the diverging groups of white prismatic crystals found in compact basalt.

Graduate student Christian Long of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Center for Superconductivity Research, Department of Physics at the University of Maryland was awarded the 2006 Bruker AXS Excellence in X-ray Diffraction scholarship again this year for unique applications in the category of materials science.

His paper is entitled 'Rapid structural mapping of the ternary metallic alloy systems using the combinatorial approach and cluster analysis'.

The winner and his advisor, Professor Ichiro Takeuchi, describe his work as "Extremely important in high-throughput materials science, where large number of samples are synthesised and measured simultaneously in order to dramatically increase the pace of materials discovery".

The current work has been submitted to Review of Scientific Instruments and is awaiting review before publication.

Long explained his research, saying: "The idea behind this work was to make the process of looking at hundreds of diffraction spectra easier by taking the data set and filtering out all of the repeated information.

"Cluster analysis is a great tool for this because we can use it to classify all of the diffraction patterns into discrete groups, and then represent each group with only a single diffraction pattern".

In the future, Long will continue his graduate work on data visualisation for combinatorial libraries and advanced microwave microscopy techniques.

The University of Maryland has one of the largest research efforts in combinatorial materials science.

Honorary mention goes to Matt Izawa from the University of Western Ontario, advised by Associate Professors Penelope King and Roberta Flemming on his research on an investigation of the Tagish Lake Carbonaceous chondrite using X-ray microdiffraction; chondrites are stony meteorites that have not been modified due to melting or differentiation of the parent body.

They formed when various types of dust and small grains that were present in the early solar system accreted to form primitive asteroids.

Honorable mention also goes to Svetlana Neretina, supervised by Peter Mascher with James Britten providing expertise in crystallography, from McMaster University in Ontario for her research paper on the role of lattice mismatch in the deposition of CdTe thin films.

Cadmium telluride (CdTe) is a crystalline compound formed from cadmium and tellurium with a zinc blende (cubic) crystal structure.

CdTe, while more expensive than silicon-based technologies, offers higher efficiency when used in solar cells (photovoltaics).

"We are very pleased to provide these scholarships to these excellent students, and we are most impressed by the quality of the XRD experiments that these advanced students performed, and the valuable scientific results obtained", said Uwe Preckwinkel, Bruker AXS product manager for materials research.

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