Crystallography is considered by many to be the single most important scientific field behind the immense scientific and technological progress of the 20th century. It allowed us to peek into the atomic structure of matter and provided us with a wealth of information about the materials around us, from minerals to proteins. The key crystallographic method behind this success has been x-ray diffraction. But this method has its limitations, the key one being that it requires a relatively large volume of the studied material. Recently, an alternative to x-ray diffraction emerged, which does not suffer from this limitation: three-dimensional electron diffraction. This method provides similar information to x-ray diffraction but in materials with more than a million times smaller volumes. In this talk, I will describe the method, its rapid development in the fifteen years since its introduction, and the impact this method has had and will have on the fields of materials science, chemistry, and molecular biology.
Design of functional metal-organic frameworks through computational crystal structure prediction
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are highly versatile materials with diverse functional applications in gas storage and separation, catalysis, water purification and sensing, to name a few. The design of new MOFs is a challenging task, heavily reliant on experimental...
