The user meeting is a far smaller meeting than Goldschmidt and serves a different purpose as it brings together people who use the Diamond light source - physicists, chemists, biologists, material scientists - al sorts of scientists who use the high intensity radiation that Diamond produces to do their stuff. I came along as I will be at Diamond in December using beamline B22 (a.k.a. Miriam which of course stands for Multimode Infrared imaging and microspectroscopy). I haven't used this beamline before, (usually I'm on i18 working with X-rays to find out about element speciation) and the user meeting featured a day and a half course on how to use the software available at the beamline to interpret and display your data once you have got it. It was also a chance to meet up with some of the beamline scientists who will be helping us on the beamline and discuss sample preparation. The workshop was very helpful though I felt we spent to long looking at the different colours you could use to display data and there was a missed opportunity for a sing song when we explored the "Winner takes all" function. I'm sure we'll address this last point during our beamtime in December!
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| Getting ready to learn more software tricks for displaying FTIR data. Stefanie Lutz, Liane Benning and Andy Bray from Leeds School of Earth and Environmental Science are in the foreground. |
On the evening of the first night there was an interesting talk on the Braggs (William and Lawrence) who were pioneers in techniques using X-rays to look at the structure of crystals. They got the Nobel prize for their work, Lawrence remains the youngest recipient of the prize to this day (25 years old). Their Wikipedia entries are well worth a read.
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