Allen J. Hall

The society formerly known as the American Vacuum Society (AVS) is holding their international conference in Boston, MA next week! And I’ll be there! [Exciting!] If you are going to be there, drop me a line on the blog and we can snag a coffee or beer together.

The programs and cards sent out may have a familiar image!

My AFM image of the CuInSe₂ Bicrystals I grow in our lab won second place in the Art-Zone competition last year! It was great fun! [Thanks goes to AVS for being a fantastic organization!]

Wish me luck with my talk!!

A series of MATLAB functions will follow. Some of these “.m” files call each other, so ensure you have all of them before you start.

The purpose of this file is to load in all the .x00 files in a directory of Omega-Omega-2-Theta slices for reciprocal space mapping of a sample. Please note that as of this writing, the data has not yet been converted to Q-space.

The first function loads data into your workspace for a directory of .x00 files that have a common base filename. The user needs to supply the first index number and last index number for loading the files. The program then attempts to load “filenameIndex.x00″ in a linear fashion for all .x00 files of that filename indexed in the cd’d directory. [Change directory to the working directory needed before starting this function.]

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There will be a number of posts following this one that will attempt to recreate reciprocal space mapping in MATLAB. The functions that will be posted in the coming days read in .x00 files from the Philips XPert XRD system and try to recreate the slices of Omega Omega-2Theta scans produced for reciprocal space mapping.

Currently I haven’t changed the data into Q-space, so they will be reported in Omega -v- Omega2Theta space.

An example call to the function is:

DisplayQSpace1('',9,184);

Example output of the function(s):

I decided here and there to publish various MATLAB functions I’ve written for my own work. There’s just one caveat- each one of these is a serious work in progress. In fact, they may not progress much more than what is disclosed here since they get the job done for me.

But, I felt that this likely would help a few people who are trying to do the same type of thing, and I’d rather ease those who come after me, and give them a slight step ahead if possible.

For those of you with old version of the Philips XPert XRD software (specifically those who can’t output in XRDML files), I offer a crude import function for simple scans.

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One of the things that makes a Scientist good at what he does (and sometimes gets him serious accolades) is effective communication and visualization of his data, results, and concepts. This is helpful for everyone from the business researcher to the teaching professor (to the graduate-student).

(You’ll never guess where this discussion is going, so click on through to read more and be surprised…)
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