The 16th International Conference on Surface X-ray and Neutron Scattering (SXNS16)

Abstract

The 16 International Conference on Surface X-ray and Neutron Scattering took place virtually from the January 11–14, 2022. The conference series has a long history and have occurred roughly every 2 years between the first meeting in Marseille, France in 1989 and the fifteenth meeting in Pohang, Korea in 2018. Following this pattern, the sixteenth conference had originally been planned to be hosted by the European Spallation Source (ESS) and MaxIV Laboratory in Lund, Sweden, in the summer of 2020. Unfortunately, this had to be rearranged several times due to the evolving pandemic and its associated travel restrictions. It had been hoped that we could finally host a physical meeting in January this year. Plans for this were well advanced, but unfortunately, when the Omicron variant hit we were forced to move online about 6 weeks before the start of the conference. Despite these rather chaotic circumstances, the conference was able to go ahead successfully with about 180 registrations (Figure 1). The nature of an international online meeting means the attendance of the online sessions is always a fraction of the total registrations, however the organizers were pleasantly surprised by the sustained engagement from the attendees, with an average session attendance of around 80 and a peak at about 120. The conference was hosted using a combination of Zoom and the Gather.town platform, which allows the simulation of a virtual venue including a sponsor exhibition and poster boards. A key feature of this platform was that it ensured that the community could meet and chat in the coffee breaks and poster session, as if in a real venue. The platform Meeting Report