ExperimentalTech
From canSAS
Notes from Breakouts
Summary
- Co-operation between facilities would be helpful in terms of getting better support from suppliers for widely used ancillary and sample environment equipment.
- This minimizes duplication of efforts,
- Makes it easier to integrate new unique pieces of sample environment,
- Equipment suppliers would benefit from the better exploitation and demonstration of their products to the wide community of users at facilities.
- It was mentioned that SAS community attempts to initiate cross-facility standards for sample environment should check with the International Society for Sample Environment (ISSE) as to what else is be being done.
- It was noted that data formats need to be flexible and extensible to allow for the fact that new techniques and new ample environment equipment often generates new parameters, data and metadata that need to be recorded in data files and that some must feed into the final data reduced data files.
- Making more information readily accessible is helpful particularly to share information about current technique development,
- There is a need for tables of definitions of acronyms.
- Users of beam lines benefit from provision of manuals etc. These need to be prepared as both 'quick guides' for measurement protocols and for more extensive reference documents. Systematic logs of changes are helpful when returning for further experiments. Shared examples of useful formats and of good practice would be helpful and could be made available on the web.
- Emerging and new techniques require new reference materials or others ways of validating results. The fields of grazing incidence scattering and soft X-ray methods were identified as needing materials that should be addressed in future round-robin studies by the Reproducibility and Reliability working group.
- Means of reducing and analyzing the data that comes from new measurements can be a bottleneck that would benefit from appropriate standard data formats as well as shared software.
- The need for extensive physical access to facilities was noted, particularly for new experimental techniques.
