X-ray Centennial in Moscow

To commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the discovery of X-rays, a conference on "Interference Phenomena in X-ray Scattering" (IPX-95) was organized by the Institute of Crystallography, the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and the National Committee of Russian Crystallographers in August 1995. Y. Ossipyan, the Director of the Institute of Solid State Physics RAS, opened the conference with a lecture on characterization of nanometerscale materials (fullerenes and organic and inorganic layers and interfaces). B. Vainshtein, the chairman of the Organizing Committee, described the history of the use of X-rays to study condensed matter and biological structures. Other presentations included recent work with X-ray Standing Waves (M. Kovalchuk, Russia), X-ray interferometry in metrology and microtomography (U. Bonse, Germany), the effect of fast magnetic switching on nuclear collective decay of Bragg scattering (S. Kikuta), interferometry using grazing incidence Fresnel mirrors (M. Belakhovsky, France), multi-beam dynamical diffraction of root-scan profiles (S. L. Chang, Taiwan), fluorescence studies of surfactants (F. Rustichelli , Italy), grazing incidence studies of magnetic metals multilayers (B. Tanner, UK), Langmuir-Blodgett films (L. Feigin, Russia), fullerenes (V. Shekht, Russia), and multilayer optics (N. Salashenko). Lectures delivered by E. Zolotoyabko (Israel), M. Brunei (France), and V. Nosik (Russia) showed that X-ray diffraction on vibrating crysrals can be used for X-ray optics,structure characterization and time resolved investigations. S. Mazurenko (Russia) described technological development at the synchrotron radiation center at Zelenograd which was visited by the conference participants. K. Kohra (Japan) offered a parallel summary of synchrotron radiation use in Japan. Financial support was provided by the IUCr, the Russian Ministry of Science and Technology Policy, the Russian Basic Research Foundation, and the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Organizing Committee expresses its deep gratitude to all these institutions.