Multigrain X-ray diffraction (sometimes called 3D-XRD or HEDM depending on communities) allows characterizing hundreds of crystals in a polycrystalline material. It has been adapted to diamond anvil cell experiments for the investigation of materials under high pressure and high temperature. The method lies at the core of the experimental portion of the TIMEleSS project. We use it to characterize transformation and deformation microstructures in mantle minerals.
Multigrain X-ray diffraction can be hard to learn and implement. Hence, along the course of the project, timeless members documented their procedures for processing such data in an online documentation: the TIMEleSS Multigrain Wiki.
We are now finished with our rounds of experiments, data has been processed, and results are being submitted for publication, so it is time to give back to the community! The TIMEleSS Multigrain Wiki has been accessible for years to who knew the URL. Now the link is public and should be easy to find with your best search engines. Please use it, enjoy it, and do not hesitate to contact us if you want to contribute and suggest corrections
This wiki, among with other outputs, was used as a basis for the creation of the Commission on Diffraction Microstructure Imaging of the International Union of Crystallography. This new Commission on Diffraction Microstructure Imaging was established at the Prague General Assembly in August 2021 and TIMEleSS PI S. Merkel is one of the founding members for the application.
In addition to contributing the TIMEleSS Multigrain Wiki, TIMEleSS members also released a set of python and matlab utilities to process, analyze, plot, and understand multigrain X-ray diffraction data. All are released under an open-source licence at GitHub on the TIMEleSS-tools and TIMEleSS-Matlab repositories.