The MRS Symposium Proceeding series is an internationally recognised reference suitable for researchers and practitioners.

This book combines the proceedings of Symposium GG, Electron Crystallography for Materials Research, and Symposium HH, Quantitative Characterization of Nanostructured Materials, both from the 2009 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco. Papers from Symposium GG focus on the fundamentals and recent progress in electron crystallography and associated strategies for structural fingerprinting of nanocrystals. Some consensus was reached regarding precession electron diffraction and electron diffraction tomography as instrumental breakthroughs leading to ab initio determinations of unknowns with high structural complexity. Some of these unknowns may only exist as nanocrystals. For Symposium HH, experts in a wide variety of probing techniques come together in an effort to find optimal, and often combined, approaches for determining atomic structure at the nanoscale - the problem at the core of nanotechnology.

The polycrystalline and nanocrystalline states play an increasingly important role in exploiting the properties of materials, encompassing applications as diverse as pharmaceuticals, catalysts, solar cells and energy storage. A knowledge of the three-dimensional atomic and molecular structure of materials is essential for understanding and controlling their properties, yet traditional single-crystal X-ray diffraction methods lose their power when only polycrystalline and nanocrystalline samples are available. It is here that powder diffraction and single-crystal electron diffraction techniques take over, substantially extending the range of applicability of the crystallographic principles of structure determination. This volume, a collection of teaching contributions presented at the Crystallographic Course in Erice in 2011, clearly describes the fundamentals and the state-of-the-art of powder diffraction and electron diffraction methods in materials characterisation, encompassing a diverse range of disciplines and materials stretching from archeometry to zeolites. As such, it is a comprehensive and valuable resource for those wishing to gain an understanding of the broad applicability of these two rapidly developing fields.

The MRS Symposium Proceeding series is an internationally recognised reference suitable for researchers and practitioners.

The MRS Symposium Proceeding series is an internationally recognised reference suitable for researchers and practitioners.

The MRS Symposium Proceeding series is an internationally recognised reference suitable for researchers and practitioners.