Report for
2004 of the IUCr Commission on High Pressure.
High pressure crystallography remains a very
active field with a wide variety of technical developments and new scientific
applications. For this reason, one of the most important goals of the high-pressure
commission is to help the community to exchange know-how and disseminate new
achievements. It is doing this by organizing special workshops in each of the
two years between the triennial IUCr congress. These workshops also help to broaden the field and
attract new people. One of the main concerns is to support and promote
participation of young scientists.
In 2004, this workshop was hosted by the
Canadian Light Source between August 18th and August 21st.
It was sponsored jointly by the International
Union of Crystallography (IUCr),
the President of the
This
year’s workshop tried to embrace the full width of high-pressure
crystallography. The scientific program therefore covered many scientific and
technological areas of interest to the High Pressure Commission. The Workshop
was arranged into 11 sessions over three and a half days. Each session focused on a particular subject
and was led by a keynote lecture introducing the state-of-the-art of the field.
There are a total of 47 oral presentations covering diverse topical subjects
such as structural studies on biological materials, liquid-liquid transition, amorphous solids, chemistry and novel materials
and structures, superconductivity and magnetism, computational crystallography
and the latest development in instrumentation and methodologies for structural
determination. A large portion of the presentations was given by young
scientists (10 lectures by recent postdoctorals and
students). In addition to formal
presentations, a poster session with 22 contributions provided an alternative
forum for further scientific discussions. The social high-light was the
workshop dinner held at a Saskatchewan ranch and included unusual but
entertaining activities such as corral maze, a tour in a horse wagon and
bare-back horse riding. It ended with a bus drive through the Canadian night
displaying a magnificent aurora borealis.
The workshop was attended by close to 90 participants from
13 different countries. The organization committee is particularly grateful to
the financial support from IUCr. A total of 20 young
scientists benefited from its travel support. Poster prizes were given away to
young scientists to encourage their participation.
The workshop in
The high-pressure commissions Homepage is
maintained by the commission member John Loveday and continues to update the
high-pressure community on information with respect to software, future and
past meetings, central facilities, scientists and publications in the
high-pressure field. The homepage can be accessed on http://www.iucr.org/iucr-top/comm/chp/index.html