Powder CIF dictionary

The powder CIF dictionary (pdCIF) is a supplement to the Core dictionary addressing the needs of powder diffractionists. While the goal of the initial CIF effort was to define a file format to contain information typically found in a single-crystal structure manuscript (and supplementary materials), the powder CIF effort had the additional goals of documenting and archiving experimental data. It is intended that powder CIF be used for communication of completed studies, but also for data exchange between laboratories. This is frequently done at shared diffraction facilities such as neutron and synchrotron sources. The powder dictionary was written anticipating needs from conventional X-ray diffractometers, as well as from synchrotron, CW neutron, TOF neutron, and energy dispersive X-ray instruments

Current official release

• Version 1.0.1 of 14 June 2005
  • HTML version
  • Formatted pdf version [Chapter 4.2 of International Tables for Crystallography Volume G: Definition and exchange of crystallographic data, First edition (2005)]
• Search for a data name.

Development versions

Ongoing development of the powder dictionary using the DDLm dictionary definition language can be viewed on GitHub.

• Powder CIF dictionary (DDLm version)
• Powder CIF dictionary (legacy DDL1 version to track changes since the last official release)

Archival versions

• Version 1.0 of 29 October 1997

Supporting materials

• Template form for the submission of the results of a Rietveld refinement of a model against powder diffraction data to an IUCr journal
• Example submission to an IUCr journal
• Template form for the submission of powder diffraction data in CIF format to an IUCr journal
• Example data set submitted to an IUCr journal
• Example of a powder CIF for a multiple phase/multiple data set refinement

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Updated 23 June 2022