Commission on High Pressure

Report for 2003 of the IUCr Commission on High Pressure

The main objective of the high-pressure commission is to promote and coordinate advances and new developments in crystallographic applications of high-pressure science. A special emphasis is given in helping new and/or young scientists with their specific scientific problems to be able to use high-pressure as one of the tools to answer their specific structural questions and in turn to contribute with their work to the development of high-pressure crystallography. As the main tools to achieve this goal, the commission organizes workshops in each of the two years between the triennial IUCr congress. In 2003, this workshop was organized at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and sponsored jointly by LBL, the NSF-sponsored “Consortium for Materials Properties Research in Earth Sciences” (COMPRES) and the IUCr. In addition to the ‘regular’ workshop, the commission for the first time helped to organize a crystallography summer school held in Erice, Italy.

Erice Summer School

The “High-Pressure Crystallography” course was organized as the 34th Crystallographic Course of the Euro Summer School and simultaneously a NATO Advanced Science Institute at the Ettore Majorana Centre, Erice, Sicily 4-15 June, 2003. It was the first High-Pressure school organized by the IUCr-High-Pressure Commission, fully dedicated to young scientists interested in entering into the field or developing their skills after some years of carrying out their high-pressure research.

The idea of this course originated in 1998 in the IUCr High-Pressure Commission. Initially it was planned to be held in Warsaw, to coincide with the High-Pressure Courses organized there since 1995, but was later moved to Erice in order to embed it into the Euro Summer School. Andrzej Katrusiak of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and Paul F. McMillan of London University College acted as course director. The local organization and additional support was provided by Lodovico Riva di Sanseverino (University of Bologna) and Paola Spadon (University of Padova) and is gratefully acknowledged. 120 participants attended the course. A total of 45 lectures were given by: M. I. McMahon, R. J. Angel, J. B. Parise, A. Katrusiak, J.S. Loveday, P.F. McMillan, M. Mezouar, O. Shimomura, V. Petřiček, B. Winkler, J.S. Tse, A.R. Oganov, W. B. Holzapfel, L. Pusztai, J.-P. Itie, A. Armigliato, M. Szafrański, M. Paz-Pasternak, I. N. Gonharenko, F. Rodriguez, S.S. Batsanov, L. Dubrovinsky, V.L. Solozhenko, A. Gauzzi, V. F. Degtyareva, N.L. Ross, W. F. Kuhs, E. V. Boldyreva, G. Krauss, R. Fourme, S.M. Gruner.

Apart of the lectures, there were 10 workshops organized focusing on the practical aspects of the theoretical calculations for high-pressure research, and of experiments either in in-house labs or national and international research facilities. These workshops were overbooked by the students and additional meetings with the tutors had to be arranged. Two poster sessions presented nearly 70 posters and provided yet an additional forum for discussions. The school was also transmitted life on the internet. This forum was used by several dozens of participants, who contributed questions and answers to the discussions via the chat-room.

Program, as well as organization of the course was evaluated very positively by the participants. We are very grateful for the financial support for young scientists from IUCr. (Andrej Katrusiak)

2003 IUCr High-Pressure Workshop, LBL, Berkeley

The regular IUCr-high-pressure workshop was organized at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) in Berkeley on December 4th – 7th 2003. This year’s workshop was focusing on the theme “Non-ambient Crystallography: The Science of Change”. It was sponsored jointly by IUCr, LBL, COMPRES and NSF. The organization of the workshop was headed by Simon Clark (LBL, COMPRES), Abby Kavner (UCLA, COMPRES) and Sarah Tolbert (UCLA, member of IUCr high-pressure commission).

In addition to a range of interesting micro-symposia (“anisotropy in P/T deformations”, “kinetics of structural change”, “theory of structure under pressure”, “transport under pressure”, “phase transitions”, “synthesis at high pressure”) this year’s workshop also offered four hands-on introductory workshops on “high-pressure infra-red spectroscopy”, “high-pressure powder diffraction”, “laser-heated diamond anvil cells” and “general alignment and maintenance of diamond anvil cells”. These workshops greatly benefited from the infrastructure of the hosting ALS. As usual for the IUCr high-pressure workshops, the oral lectures were also complemented by two poster sessions. The workshop attracted more than 80 participants. Thanks to the support of IUCr and NSF, a total of 20 young students benefited from travel support.

Homepage

The high-pressure commissions homepage is maintained by the commission member John Loveday and continues to update the high-pressure community on information on software, future and past meetings, central facilities, scientists and publications in the high-pressure field. The homepage can be accessed on http://www.iucr.org/iucr-top/comm/chp/index.html.

Future meetings

Part of the commission’s activity in 2003 related to upcoming meetings in 2004 and 2005. In 2004, the commission is organizing another IUCr high-pressure workshop, this time at the new Canadian synchrotron radiation facility in Saskatoon. Commission member John Tse is heading the organization for the event, taking place from August 18th – 21st.

In addition to this, the commission spent time in putting together a draft proposal for an interesting high-pressure program for the up-coming 2005 general congress and assembly in Firenze. John Parise represents the high-pressure commission in the program committee. The commission came up with a proposal of 6 microsymposia to be held on 6 succeeding half-days. According to this proposal, the commission will also nominate a keynote lecturer for each of these three days.

These pages are maintained by the Commission Last updated: 15 Oct 2021