Peter Debye (left) at the First Congress and General Assembly of the IUCr in Cambridge, MA, USA in 1948 and Paul Scherrer (image credit: public domain via Wikimedia Commons).

100 years of the X-ray powder diffraction method

The 100th anniversary of powder diffraction is being celebrated in a blog by André Authier, Professor Emeritus at Université P. et M. Curie, Paris, France and former president of the IUCr. The blog describes the role of Paul Scherrer and Peter Debye in Göttingen, Germany, and Albert Hull in Schenectady, NY, USA, in discovering – independently – one of the most powerful and widely used methods for analysing matter. This centenary – along with the 50-year jubilee of the introduction of the Rietveld method – was recently commemorated at a Debye & Rietveld symposium in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. And at Nobel Prize time, it is interesting to note that it is 80 years since the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Debye “for his contributions to our knowledge of molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and on the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases”.

Furthermore, the November 2016 issue of Acta Cryst. A will feature selected papers from DSE2015: 100 years of the Debye scattering equation, a workshop held at Cavalese, Italy in June 2015. The first article in this special issue, “Towards atomistic understanding of polymorphism in the solvothermal synthesis of ZrO₂ nanoparticles” by Dippel et al., is now online.