About the Seminar:

Title:

Analysis of disordered crystal structures
Reinhard B. Neder
Crystallography and structural physics; Dep. Physics
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen Nürnberg, Erlangen, Gemany

Abstract:

Arguably crystalline matter with moderate to high defect concentration is technologically more important than a perfect crystal structure. As an example, ionic conductivity of modern battery materials crucially depends on the presence and interaction of defects. As the intensity of Bragg reflections is blind to the non-periodic distribution of defects the analysis must include total scattering i.e. Bragg and diffuse scattering throughout the entire diffraction pattern. Conversion of the diffraction pattern into direct space with the Pair-Distribution-Function technique for powders and single crystals allows detailed analysis of local defects in crystalline matter. Current advances in instrumentation and algorithms will be illustrated with two examples: in-situ analysis of nanoparticle nucleation and single crystal diffuse scattering.

About the Speaker:

Reinhard Neder studied mineralogy at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster with the support of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation . After his undergraduate degree, he went to Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA, where he received his Master of Science in Geology in 1985. Under the guidance of Friedrich Frey, he then worked until 1989 on his doctoral thesis on the topic “Determination of the defect structure of cubically stabilized zirconia (Zr _0.85 Ca _0.15 O _1.85) at 290 K and 1550 K by means of integral and purely elastic neutron diffraction” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich at the research reactor FRM I. The doctoral thesis was followed by an assistantship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich in the working group of Heinz Hermann Schulz, in which he wrote his habilitation thesis in 1996. During this period, he published the beginnings of what is now a comprehensive program suite, DISCUS. In 1997 he was appointed professor for crystal structure theory at the chair for mineralogy and crystal structure theory at the Julius Maximilians University in Würzburg. ^[1]In 2008 he moved to the Chair of Crystallography and Structural Physics at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, where he is still a professor of the physics of condensed matter. ^[2]