2015 Annual Report of the IUCr Commission on Magnetic Structures
The voting membership of the commission, which did not change in 2015, includes Branton Campbell (Chair, USA), Andrea Cornea (Italy), Daniel Litvin (USA), Manuel Perez-Mato (Spain), Vaclav Petricek (Czech Republic), Alexander Pirogov (Russia), Vladimir Pomjakushin (Switzerland), Juan Rodriguez-Carvajal (France), Taku Sato (Japan) and Wieslawa Sikora (Poland). The commission’s consultants include: Mois Aroyo (Spain), Maria Teresa Fernandez-Diaz (Institut Laue Langevin, France), Harold Stokes (USA), and Andrew Wills (UK).
During the first half of 2015, the IUCr magCIF working group generated numerous additions revisions to the new magCIF dictionary project. The revisions included (1) the addition of support for incommensurate structures, which had been negotiated during the previous year, (2) many revisions in response to feedback from working-group members regarding OG and BNS settings of commensurate magnetic space groups, (3) changes to the structure of tags that describe transformations to other settings, and (4) many other minor improvements. A new tag structure was also tentatively introduced, which allows the description of magnetic propagation vectors in OG settings.
Ten commission members and consultants conducted an internet-video meeting on 24 November 2015. Participants included Andrew Wills, Alexander Pirogov, Vladimir Pomjakushin, Vaclav Petricek, Danny Litvin, Wieslawa Sikora, Taku Sato, Manuel Perez-Mato, Juan Rodriguez-Carvajal, and Branton Campbell. The meeting focus was the recommendation of KN speakers and MS topics for the 2017 Congress in Hyderabad. A prioritized list of topics and speakers was agreed upon in the weeks following the meeting, many of which are likely to be of interest to other commissions. Commission member Taku Sato was elected earlier in the year to serve on the International Program Committee of the congress and will attend the IPC planning meeting in Hyderabad in March 2016. Following commission discussions at the 2014 Congress in Montreal, Juan presented plans for a one-week school for 30 participants in late 2016, where topics could include magnetic structures and their descriptions, magnetic symmetry, the determination of magnetic structures, etc.
The commission’s website at https://magcryst.org continues to promote meetings that give attention to high-quality magnetic-structure research. At many of these events, our commission members gave featured presentations, developed workshop components, organized or hosted workshops and microsymposia, and presented lecture courses. Highlights include the following:
- Aperiodic 2015, Prague, Czech Republic, 30 Aug to 04 Sep 2015 (Vaclav Petricek – meeting organizer).
- 5th School on Representational Analysis and Magnetic Structures (RAMS), University of Maryland, College Park, USA, 2-7 Aug 2015 (Manuel Perez-Mato, lecturer)
- European Conference on Neutron Scattering, Zaragoza Spain, 30 Aug to 04 Sep 2015 (meeting co-sponsored by the IUCr CMS, Vladimir Pomjakusin – session organizer, Manuel Perez-Mato – plenary lecture, over 60 sessions with content involving magnetic structures and phenonena)
- European Crystallographic Meeting, Rovinj, Croatia, 23-18 Aug 2015 (Wielslawa Sikora – sesion organizer, Manu Perez-Mato – invited presentation)
- Second Balkan School on Fundamental Crystallography and Workshop on Magnetic Symmetry, Istanbul, Turkey, 13-19 July 2015 (Manuel Perez-Mato, lecturer)
- British Crystallography Association Meeting, York, UK, 30 Mar to 02 Apr 2015 (Branton Campbell – workshop lecturer)
- Fullprof school, ILL, Grenoble France, 2-5 Mar 2015 (Juan Rodriguez-Carvajal — organizer)
Branton J. Campbell
Commission Chair