Historical Materials BAG Meeting

The “Historical materials BAG” is a collaborative project started one year ago to give the cultural heritage user community facilitated and regular access to the diffraction beamlines ID22 and ID13.

This access is very successful and many research projects from European museums and universities have already benefited from it, to study paintings, ceramics, wood fragments…

The Historical material BAG meeting was a 2-day event, which took place at ESRF on 5th and 6th December 2022. It gave the opportunity to the Historical materials BAG partners to exchange about the scientific outcomes of the BAG after one year, to discuss future plans and to be trained on the use of FullProf software.

Despite the sudden SNCF strike, 23 persons attended the event, most of them being PhD students from all over Europe and about one third of them were new BAG partners.

The first day was dedicated to scientific presentations, with very high quality talks which showed the variety of scientific projects benefiting from the BAG and the excellent work done by each partner.

The discussion was mainly around possible improvements in the BAG operation.

On the second day a training on the FullProf software was proposed (course given by Gilles Wallez, Chimie Paris) and was very well received by the participants and even after 6pm people were still enthusiastically trying to refine their XRD patterns.

The event was a clear success, moreover because after one year of operation, it was important to get scientific feedback from the BAG partners and to discuss ways to further improve this process.