1st Greek Summer School Snychrotron Radiation: properties & applications

The program consists of hour-long lectures and afternoon Lab courses where the participants had the opportunity to handle experimental data and practice on data evaluation and visualization (infographics). The tutors are experts in the field of Synchrotron Radiation. One of our future plans is to perform further synchrotron XRD and X-ray absorption measurements on borosilicate glass samples which matrix elements include Si, B, Na, Ba and Zr, other additions include Ce, Nd, Eu and U to observe the fine structure of borosilicate glasses better and understand the effects of actinide and lanthanide addition to a glass matrix. I have already had the opportunity to learn a number of techniques (XANES, EXAFS, GIXRF) through my studies and have been able to participate in synchrotron measurements at Elettra, I would like to further expand my knowledge on the subject and acquire the knowledge needed to evaluate and analyse the data. During the summer school we had hour-long lectures and afternoon Lab courses where we had the opportunity to handle experimental data and practice on data evolution and visualization. The program lasted four days, each day had a different main topic and theme. On the first day, we studied the principals of synchrotron radiation, which included the properties of the beamline as well as the overall structure of a facility and its instrumentation. On the following day, we studied X-ray diffraction, which can be performed both on powder samples and on single crystals, and in the rest of the day, we also studied X-ray scattering, which was connected to a laboratory exercise, so we got to know the use of FullProf, GSAS-II, VESTA and PowDLL programs. After that, X-ray spectroscopy was the main topic. In this section we learned about X-ray absorption fine structure, X-ray Fluorescene, high resolution X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray Magnetic Circular Dichroism and their implementation in material science. During the lab course, we learned to use ATHENA and ARTEMIS from the Demeter software packages to evaluate and process real-life data and we used the PyMca program to analyze and quantify Sy-XRF spectrums. The last day was about X-ray imaging, mainly Scanning X-ray microscopy and X-ray tomography. We also studied some extreme conditions/industrial applications regarding this topic. My final conclusion about the summer school is that it was incredibly important to further expand my knowledge on this subject. The presentations were given by experts, who helped me to get the most up-to-date information possible regarding synchrotron radiation. The lectures and lab courses on EXAFS, XANES and X-ray tomography are essential so that I can evaluate similar data in my PhD thesis in the most precise way.