Abstract
This special issue contains a collection of papers reflecting the content of the second workshop on reverse Monte Carlo (RMC) methods, held in a hotel on hills overlooking Budapest in October 2003. Around forty participants gathered to hear talks and discuss a broad range of science based on the RMC technique in very convivial surroundings.
Reverse Monte Carlo modelling is a method for producing three-dimensional disordered structural models in quantitative agreement with experimental data. The method was developed in the late 1980's and has since achieved wide acceptance within the scientific community. It is particularly suitable for studies of the structures of liquid and amorphous materials, although it has also been used for a number of disordered crystalline systems. There is currently a great interest in the properties of disordered materials and this has produced a resurgence in methods for investigating their structures, with an increased number of high-quality instruments at central facilities for neutron and x-ray scattering from disordered materials. Methods such as RMC are currently in great demand for analysing the resulting total scattering and XAS data and the RMC methodology is actively being developed by a number of groups worldwide. Within this context, the RMC workshop was particularly timely, providing a forum for those workers in the field to take stock of past achievements and to look forward to future developments. It is our hope that the collection of papers within this special issue will also communicate this to the wider scientific community, by providing a balance between papers that have more of an introductory review flavour and those that concentrate on current state of the art research opportunities using the RMC method.
The order of the papers within this special issue reflects this balance. The first two papers are introductory reviews of the RMC method in general and as applied specifically to crystalline systems, respectively. The next, largest group describes a wide range of scientific applications of the RMC method within liquid, amorphous, crystalline and nanocrystalline materials. The final group of papers have a bias towards method development and testing, particularly with regard to the use of XAS data in RMC modelling.
We are very grateful to Institute of Physics Publishing for their willingness to publish the proceedings of this meeting in a special issue of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter.