by Julian Oberdisse, CNRS – Montpellier, France
The 16th European Summer School on “Scattering Methods Applied to Soft Condensed Matter”, also known as the “Bombannes School”, was organised by the University of Montpellier and the ILL Grenoble, France, and was once again sponsored by SoftComp, among others. It took place in the vacation centre ‘Les Bruyères’ in Carcan-Maubuisson from 4th to 11th of June 2024. 42 students, almost all PhD students, have been admitted to the school, of some 20 different nationalities (see Fig. 2), coming from laboratories in 12 different European countries.
Fig. 1: Group picture of the participants of the Bombannes Summer School 2024, mostly wearing event T-shirts. Copyright: organisers
The full programme of the summer school encompassed a total of 26 hours of lectures, complemented by evening presentations. The lectures were divided into two parts: an introductory session during the first half of the week covered the areas of general introduction to scattering experiments, basic concepts of data treatment, the notion of contrast, general theorems, instrumentation and resolution effects. In the second half of the week, the applications of static and dynamic scattering techniques to investigate typical soft matter systems were presented, including colloidal suspensions, microemulsions, micelles and surfactant solutions, polymers, biological systems and turbid suspensions. Each participant was required to present their work in the evening, in front of all teachers and participants.
Fig. 2: Pins show the nationalities of the participants on maps of Europe and the world. Copyright: organisers
Event website: https://workshops.ill.fr/event/398/
