A new high temperature, high heating rate, low axial gradient capillary heater.

A new heater design, capable of fast heating and cooling to and from >1000°C, has been developed at the Swiss-Norwegian Beamlines, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, France. The design uses a SiC head to distribute heat, and resistive SiN heat cartridges to provide heat.

Preliminary observations of the interplay of radiation damage with spin crossover.

Intense synchrotron radiation makes time-resolved structural experiments with increasingly finer time sampling possible. On the other hand, radiation heating, radiation-induced volume change and structural disorder become more frequent. Temperature, volume change and disorder are known to be coupled with equilibrium in molecular spin complexes, balancing between two or more spin state configurations.

On the resolution function for powder diffraction with area detectors.

In a powder diffraction experiment the resolution function defines the instrumental contribution to the peak widths as a function of the Bragg angle. The Caglioti formula is frequently applied to model the instrumental broadening and used in structural refinement. The parameters in the Caglioti formula are linked to physically meaningful parameters for most diffraction geometries.

ROBL-II at ESRF: a synchrotron toolbox for actinide research.

ROBL-II provides four different experimental stations to investigate actinide and other alpha- and beta-emitting radionuclides at the new EBS storage ring of ESRF within an energy range of 3 to 35 keV. The XAFS station consists of a highly automatized, high sample throughput installation in a glovebox, to measure EXAFS and conventional XANES of samples routinely at temperatures down to 10 K, and with a detection limit in the sub-p.p.

Kinetic Barriers and Microscopic Mechanisms of Noble Gas Adsorption by Nanoporous γ-Mg(BH ) Obtained by Means of Sub-Second X-Ray Diffraction.

Gas adsorption by porous frameworks sometimes results in structure "breathing", "pores opening/closing", "negative gas adsorption", and other phenomena. Time-dependent diffraction can address both kinetics of the guest uptake and structural response of the host framework. Using sub-second in situ powder X-ray diffraction, three intracrystalline diffusion scenarios have been evaluated from the isothermal kinetics of Ar, Kr, and Xe adsorption by nanoporous γ-Mg(BH ) .