2013 Annual Report of the IUCr Commission on Magnetic Structures
The voting membership of the commission, which did not change in 2013, includes Jane Brown (France), Branton Campbell (Chair, USA), Daniel Litvin (USA), Vaclav Petricek (Czech Republic), Alexander Pirogov (Russia), Vladimir Pomjakushin (Switzerland), Juan Rodriguez-Carvajal (France), Taku Sato (Japan) and Wieslawa Sikora (Poland). The commission is also supported by four consultants: Manuel Perez-Mato and Mois Aroyo (UPV/EHU, Spain), Harold Stokes (BYU, USA), and Maria Teresa Fernandez-Diaz (Institut Laue Langevin, France) of the Commission on Neutron Scattering.
The year has seen a great deal of software development in support of magnetic symmetry and various types of magnetic structural analysis, examples being FULPROF, JANA, the Bilbao Crystallographic Server, and the ISOTROPY suite. As these tools continue to develop and interact, the importance of the pending magnetic CIF standard is growing.
In 2013, the commission continued the difficult work of establishing standards for describing a magnetic structure, and for relating the three most common descriptions of a magnetic structure: the supercell description, the wave description, and the representational (group-theoretical) description. If treated in a fully general way, these descriptions are entirely interconvertable. But a given magnetic structure may be much easier to describe in a non-general way using just one of them. The commission is preparing a manuscript on this topic.
The book Magnetic Group Tables, authored by commission member Daniel Litvin, and formally reviewed by the commission, was published by the IUCr in 2013, and is made freely available at http://www.iucr.org/publ/978-0-9553602-2-0 as part of the celebration of the 2014 International Year of Crystallography.
Near the end of the year, the commission created a new website at https://magcryst.org, which in addition to providing basic information about the commission and its activities, provides a flexible means of advertising and supporting a variety of conferences and workshops. In addition to specific pages for events organized, sponsored, or otherwise advertised by the commission, we also provide an extensive list of othe meetings where high-quality magnetic-structure research is to be presented (https://magcryst.org/meetings/).
In preparation for the International Year of Crystallography, the commission has organized a three-day workshop on “The Role of Magnetic Symmetry in the Description & Determination of Magnetic Structures” (https://magcryst.org/meetings/cmsworkshop2014). This sattelite meeting of the 2014 IUCr Congress will be held on 14-16 August 2014 at the Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research at McMaster University, which is located in the city of Hamilton near Toronto, Canada. In addition to addressing the theoretical foundations of magnetic crystallography, the workshop will include hands-on software tutorial sessions and a number of applications lectures that demonstrate the effective of magnetic symmetry to simplify structural description and analysis. Eight of our commission members and consultants participated in a video conference on Google+ Hangout on 10 October 2013 to plan this workshop.
Professor Wieslawa Sikora (AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland) represented our commission on the International Program Committee of the 2014 IUCr Congress. At the spring-2013 IPC meeting in Montreal, she was instrumental in the planning of an impressive array of lectures and microsymposia related to magnetic crystallography (https://magcryst.org/meetings/iucr-congress-2014/). This will be an exciting and important congress for researchers in this field.
Commission members gave featured presentations, developed workshop components, and organized or hosted workshops and microsymposia at a variety of meetings in 2013. Some were not specifically organized under the auspices of the commission, but substantially furthered its objectives of promoting magnetic neutron scattering and magnetic structure determination.
- Flipper 2013: SCD with Polarized Neutrons, Grenoble, France, 23-25 Jan 2013 (Jane Brown).
- 11th TOPAS User Meeting, Gaithersburg MD, USA, 20-21 Apr 2013 (Branton Campbell).
- 8th Polish Konference on Neutron Diffraction and Complementary Methods in Investigations of Condensed Matter, Chlewiska, Poland, 16-20 June, 2013 (Wieslawa Sikora).
- International Conference on Neutron Scattering, Edinburgh, Scotland, 8-12 Jul 2013, (Juan Rodriguez-Carvajal, Vladimir Pomjakushin).
- Workshop on Resonant Elastic X-ray Scattering in Condensed Matter, Oxford, UK, 15-19 Jul 2013 (co-ponsored by IUCr-CMS).
- European Crystallographic Meeting, Warwick, UK, 25-29 Aug 2013, (Harold Stokes, Manuel Perez-Mato, Vaclav Petricek).
- Joint European Magnetic Symposia (JEMS 2013), Rhodos, Greece, 25-30 Aug 2013, (Vladimir Pomjakushin).
- Master Class on Mott Physics Beyond the Heisenberg Model, Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen, Switzerland, 26-27 Oct 2013 (Vladimir Pomjakushin).
- FullProf School, Institut Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, France, 18-22 Nov 2013 (Juan Rodriguez-Carvajal).
- Course on Magnetic Neutron Diffraction, Sep-Dec 2013, Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia (Alexander Pirogov).
Branton J. Campbell
Commission Chair