Applications of the diffraction technique in solid state chemistry from "ab-initio" structure solution to final structure refinement: powder and single crystal

Establishing the crystal structure in solid state chemistry is often a pre-requisite for understanding and predicting the function and technological properties of the matter. The single crystal and powder diffraction approaches play a fundamental role to achieve this goal.These two methods are non-destructive analytical techniques which provide detailed information about the internal lattice of crystalline substances, unit cell dimensions, bond-lengths, bond-angles, and details of site-ordering until to define completely the crystal structure.During my Doctoral Thesis, it was clear to me the ever growing idea about the necessity and importance of a detailed structural characterization, because it is the key tool for understanding and full controlling the synthesis pathway in solid state chemistry. The scope of this PhD thesis is to improve knowledge and methodology on diffraction field, using both the powder and single crystal techniques for the matter investigation up to atomic geometry scale from ab-initio structure solution of unknown compounds to structure refinement.The main results obtained in this PhD thesis ca be summarized as it follows: investigation of the kinetics of phase transformation of TiO2powder processed by ball-millig; structural microstructural and composition analysis on sixty Spanish dinosaur bones; structure solution and refinement of powder and single crystal compounds produced according to laboratory organic and inorganic syntheses.