Crystallography beamlines on DIAMOND?

The planning for the design and building of the New DIAMOND synchrotron is well under way. Two bids from the Crystallography community have been submitted to the first stage. A proposed powder station will support the rapid collection of very high-resolution data suitable for structure solution and Rietveld refinement of inorganic and organic materials. A single crystal station has been designed to study the structures of molecules in their excited states, to probe in situ reactions, to carry out rapid and highly accurate charge density and anomalous dispersion studies, to investigate the relationship between molecular disorder and the physical properties of materials, and to develop mesomolecular crystallography. The powder bid is being coordinated by Jeremy Cockcroft (Birbeck College, London) (cockcroft@img.cryst.bbk.ac.uk) and the single crystal bid by Paul Raithby (U. of Bath) (p.r.raithby@bath.ac.uk). The first meeting of the DIAMOND Special Interest Group for crystallography will take place at the Nottingham BCA Spring Meeting.

The EPSRC Nat’l X-ray Crystallography Service is being expanded to enhance work with small and weakly diffracting crystals, to complement the existing services of handling twins and expedite, high-resolution studies. The service will benefit from coordinated use of advanced diffraction facilities of the Universities of Southampton and access to the Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) at Daresbury Laboratory, where Bill Clegg holds a formal Joint Appointment. The program will include user training, encouraged by EPSRC. Workshops and possible involvement in the experimental work. A call for applications will be issued, via heads of UK University chemistry departments. See www.soton.ac.uk/~xservice and www.ncl.ac.uk/xraycry for further details