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Report on 16th International Conference on Small-Angle Scattering (SAS 2015) Berlin, Germany, September 13–18, 2015

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2016

Andrew Allen
Andrew Allen*
Affiliation:
Materials Measurement Science Division, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA
*
andrew.allen@nist.gov

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Information

Type
International Reports
Information
Powder Diffraction , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 84
Copyright
Copyright © International Centre for Diffraction Data 2016 

The 16th Triennial International Conference on Small-Angle Scattering (SAS 2015) was held in Berlin, Germany from 13 to 18 September 2015. The 2015 conference was organized jointly by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, and the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin). The venue was the main building of TU Berlin, and the conference also included optional, very well organized, visits to HZB's BESSY II X-Ray synchrotron, or BER II neutron facility.

Small-angle X-Ray scattering (SAXS) and small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) are scattering-based methods that measure the statistically-representative internal microstructures of virtually all classes of material system. The triennial SAS conferences have a long history of showcasing new results and advances involving small-angle scattering, and highlighting the metrology issues involved. In both these respects, the SAS 2015 Conference more than lived up to expectations. The conference comprised plenary and parallel oral sessions (no more than four at any one time), together with two dedicated poster sessions, and an industrial exhibition. The presence of industrial researchers, equipment manufacturers, researchers from universities and government laboratories, coming from many parts of the world, engendered numerous lively discussions and stimulating cross-disciplinary interactions.

Technical highlights of the SAS 2015 Conference included some of the first SAXS-related results based on data obtained from free electron laser (FEL) X-Ray sources, SAXS and SANS studies made in situ or in operando under increasingly exotic environmental sample conditions, and some elegant instrument design prospects for SANS at the new European Spallation Source (ESS), still some 9 years away! Complementing the scientific sessions, the conference also incorporated several important business meetings of importance to the international SAS community. These included meetings of the canSAS group (focused on the development of common data formats, SAS metadata requirements, and SAS intensity and structural calibration issues) and the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) Commission on SAS, CSAS (providing an international forum for education, communication, and standards in SAS). The SAS Conference culminated in the award of the Guinier Prize, sponsored by the IUCr for lifetime or outstanding achievement in small-angle scattering, to Professor Sow Hsin Chen (MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA), for his many contributions to science and to the field of small-angle scattering methods development and applications in fundamental studies of soft condensed matter. Selected peer-reviewed papers from SAS 2015 will be published in a Journal of Applied Crystallography Special Issue in 2016.

The next Triennial International Conference on Small-Angle Scattering (SAS 2018) will be held in Traverse City, MI, USA, and a bid process is already underway for holding SAS 2021 after that.