Preface

A little over five years have passed since the first edition of this book appeared in print. Seems like an instant but also eternity, especially considering numerous developments in the hardware and software that have made it from the laboratory test beds into the real world of powder diffraction. This prompted a revision, which had to be beyond cosmetic limits. The book was, and remains focused on standard laboratory powder diffractometry. It is still meant to be used as a text for teaching students about the capabilities and limitations of the powder diffraction method. We also hope that it goes beyond a simple text, and therefore, is useful as a reference to practitioners of the technique. The original book had seven long chapters that may have made its use as a text inconvenient. So the second edition is broken down into 25 shorter chapters. The first fifteen are concerned with the fundamentals of powder diffraction, which makes it much more logical, considering a typical 16-week long semester. The last ten chapters are concerned with practical examples of structure solution and refinement, which were preserved from the first edition and expanded by another example – solving the crystal structure of Tylenol R ©. Major revisions include an expanded discussion of nonconventional crystallographic symmetry in Chap. 5, a short description of two new types of detectors that are becoming common in laboratory powder diffractometry – real-time multiple strip and multi wire detectors in Chap. 6, a brief introduction to the total scattering analysis in Chap. 10, a short section in Chap. 11 describing nonambient powder diffractometry, an expanded discussion of quantitative phase analysis, including the basics of how to quantify amorphous component in Chap. 13, an update about the recent advancements in the ab initio indexing, together with an example of a difficult pseudo-symmetric case represented by Li[B(C2O4)2], and a major update of Chap. 15 dedicated to the fundamentals of Rietveld analysis, including a brief introduction of the mechanism of restraints, constraints, and rigid bodies. The collection of problems that may be used by instructors to assess students’ progress and as selfexercises has also expanded. All problems related to the solution and refinement of crystal structures from powder diffraction data are assembled at the end of Chap. 25.