Report for 2004 of the IUCr Commission on High Pressure

High pressure crystallography remains a very active field with a wide variety of technical developments and new scientific applications. For this reason, one of the most important goals of the high-pressure commission is to help the community to exchange know-how and disseminate new achievements. It is doing this by organizing special workshops in each of the two years between the triennial IUCr congress. These workshops also help to broaden the field and attract new people. One of the main concerns is to support and promote participation of young scientists.

In 2004, this workshop was hosted by the Canadian Light Source between August 18th and August 21st. It was sponsored jointly by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr), the President of the University of Saskatchewan, the Canadian Light Source Inc., the Canadian Institute for Synchrotron Radiation, the Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences of the National Research Council of Canada, ALMAX Industries and Blake Industries Inc. Dr. John Tse of the IUCr high-pressure commission was the organizer.

This year’s workshop tried to embrace the full width of high-pressure crystallography. The scientific program therefore covered many scientific and technological areas of interest to the High Pressure Commission. The Workshop was arranged into 11 sessions over three and a half days. Each session focused on a particular subject and was led by a keynote lecture introducing the state-of-the-art of the field. There are a total of 47 oral presentations covering diverse topical subjects such as structural studies on biological materials, liquid-liquid transition, amorphous solids, chemistry and novel materials and structures, superconductivity and magnetism, computational crystallography and the latest development in instrumentation and methodologies for structural determination. A large portion of the presentations was given by young scientists (10 lectures by recent postdoctorals and students). In addition to formal presentations, a poster session with 22 contributions provided an alternative forum for further scientific discussions. The social high-light was the workshop dinner held at a Saskatchewan ranch and included unusual but entertaining activities such as corral maze, a tour in a horse wagon and bare-back horse riding. It ended with a bus drive through the Canadian night displaying a magnificent aurora borealis.

The workshop was attended by close to 90 participants from 13 different countries. The organization committee is particularly grateful to the financial support from IUCr. A total of 20 young scientists benefited from its travel support. Poster prizes were given away to young scientists to encourage their participation.

The workshop in Saskatoon was also the only major meeting of the Commission members in 2004. Five members were present. The main items of business were the upcoming 2005-IUCr congress in Florence. Commission member John Parise represented the high-pressure Commission in the program committee. The Commission will sponsor six microsymposia on six consecutive half-days from the morning of August 26th to the afternoon of August 28th. In addition, the high-pressure Commission was able place two key-note speakers (Malcolm McMahon and John Tse) in the program. We also decided to propose two open commission meetings on the subjects of technical developments (responsible Commission member Igor Goncharenko) and high-pressure single-crystal diffraction (responsible Commission member John Loveday). With regard to the Commission workshop 2006, we decided to hold this workshop in Dubna, Russia. Local organizers have been contacted and local support has been approved. For 2007, the Diamond synchrotron source in England is planned as host. Commission member John Loveday will put together a local organizing committee.

The high-pressure commissions Homepage is maintained by the commission member John Loveday and continues to update the high-pressure community on information with respect to 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

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