Speaker
Description
Many of the useful materials that make modern life possible are crystalline. Quartz keeps our watches on time, perovskites are widely used in consumer electronics and solid oxide fuel cells may help to power the future.
The importance of local structure and disorder in crystalline materials is increasingly being recognised as a key property of many functional materials. From negative thermal expansion to solid state amorphisation and the 'nanoscale' problem to improved fuel cell technology, a clear picture of the local atomic structure is essential to understanding these phenomena and solving the associated problems.
Here I will discuss the program RMCProfile, which was built on top of the original RMCA program and that we have been developing over the past two decades to use total scattering and reverse Monte Carlo to study disordered materials. As the materials and details being studied become more complicated increasing multiple data types, together with modelling approaches, need to be combined and RMCProfile can help you achieve this. Here I will introduce why we developed the program, give a recent example to illustrate the sort of useful information you can gain using the total scattering and the RMC method and then brief describe the planned future developments.
