Workshop Description & Goals:

The power of crystallography as an analytical tool has been cemented now by 100 years of use. The advent of dedicated synchrotron X-ray sources has been widely exploited by the protein crystallography community resulting in almost fully automatized structure solution machines. However, the development of single crystal beamlines dedicated to non-protein single crystal diffraction has lagged behind. This is mostly because many problems encountered in inorganic crystal chemistry do not rely on the large throughput requirements of the protein community.

Nevertheless, there are numerous examples where a more brilliant beam with tunable energy would help to solve problems which remain untackled otherwise, such as the cases of novel phases inside a diamond anvil cell, or new minerals encased in an heterogeneous matrix. The ALS is in the fortunate position of having three beamlines with extensive single crystal capabilities, which are largely complementary to each other: the chemical crystallography beamline (11.3.1), the high pressure beamline (12.2.2) and the Laue microdiffraction beamline (12.3.2). The synergistic possibilities of these capabilities have not yet been fully exploited by the user community.

With this workshop we want to initiate a dialogue between the extended user community and the ALS staff. We will present the existing experimental opportunities in inorganic single crystal diffraction offered by the ALS, while soliciting from users what kind of capabilities are desirable and need to be developed.