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This School on Advanced Characterization Techniques was a unique opportunity for the attendees (mostly PhD students, but also professionals) to discover or learn more about advanced characterization in electron microscopy and X-Ray tomography for ceramic materials.

The program of this school was split into 2 parts: lectures in the morning and demonstrations on equipment in the afternoon. You can find the programme here.  

Seven lectures of one hour for each, gave a general overview on electron microscopies and associated techniques (SEM, TEM, in situ testing in SEM, EBSD), X-Ray tomography, images analysis and sample preparation by Focused Ion Beam :

1. S. Christiansens, Fraunhofer-Institut für Keramische Technologien und Systeme IKTS "Low voltage SEM"
2. T. Salminem, Microscopy Center, Tampere University of Technology "FIB/Sample preparation"
3. R. Podor, CEA Marcoule "Image processing"
4. L. Mancini, Zavod za gradbeništvo Slovenije "X-ray tomography"
5. D. Rafaja, Institute of Materials Science, TU Bergakademie Freiberg "Transmission Electron Microscopy"
6. K. Marquardt, Imperial college London "EBSD"
7. S. Wang, Imperial college London "SEM in situ testing"

Demonstrations on state-of-the-art equipment available on the campus were organized. These demos of 1,5 hour were the opportunity to learn how to hold an experiment (how to set up the parameters to optimize the characterization) and to follow in real-time (and in some case in situ) the characterization of a ceramic materials. Eight demos run in parallel and were animated by a specialist of each technique. Low voltage SEM, EBSD, heating experiments in SEM, TEM observations and in situ tomography are examples of topics of these demos. Each attendee had the opportunity to follow four different demos during the two days. He/she had the opportunity to choose the most interesting demos depending on his/her research field.

There were 50 participants from 20 countries (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italia, Italy, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, The Netherlands, Turkey, USA).

This School was sponsored by the JECS Trust.

We would like to thank the participants, the lecturers and all other person involved in the organisation of this School.