DSE 2015

100 Years of the 

DEBYE SCATTERING EQUATION

A workshop dedicated to the centenary of the publication of P. Debye’s paper on «Zerstreuung von Röntgenstrahlen» (Feb. 25th, 1915), which first provided an expression for the diffraction from a randomly oriented powder of scatterers. 

Over the past twenty years, the rising interest in nanomaterials, and the ever growing power and availability of computers has revived interest in the Debye Scattering Equation (DSE), which is now a paradigm in the analysis of the matter at the nanoscale. Besides and beyond the DSE, stemming from the same root, Total Scattering methods have grown steadily, gaining increasingly popularity with the Pair Distribution Function (PDF) approach. The common root is in the description of scattering based on atomic distances in clusters of atoms/molecules and nanoparticles, as an alternative to the concept of unit cell and translational symmetry of the traditional crystallography for ideal bulk crystals. 
This workshop is dedicated to DSE history, methodology, new ideas and representative applications, with further interest in PDF and Total Scattering methods to study matter at the atomic scale independently of its degree of order, be it amorphous, nanocrystalline or simply a disordered crystal.