Ask an expert: How customization can supercharge your thin-film XRD analysis in AMASS

From our email filters to our kitchen cupboards, we like to customize our workspaces. Using someone else’s setup is certainly possible – but it might lead to us missing an important invitation, or adding salt when we were looking for sugar! It’s usually more efficient to adapt our tools and systems to fit us and our needs, so they can help us perform our best. It might seem that there’s less room for customization in the laboratory or in a highly technical workflow, such as experiments and analysis. But that’s not necessarily true.

Standard methods can be helpful…

X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD) and X-ray reflectometry (XRR) are highly versatile methods for characterizing materials, and are fundamental when working with thin films and wafers. In combination with our Advanced Material Analysis and Simulation Software (AMASS), they provide rich and comprehensive data across many parameters – you get a lot of information in a short time, with a high level of accuracy when used correctly. But this versatility, plus the wealth of data generated, can sometimes be overwhelming or unwieldy to use. This is especially true for inexperienced users or students.

One way to deal with this is to rely on established methods. Referring to the manual is a time-honored way to make sure you’re getting things right, after all! But as any scientist will know, sometimes there is no manual for what you’re trying to do. Or perhaps your workflow is high-volume, and the established steps you’re following don’t scale up very well.

…but customization can be powerful

No matter how advanced your instruments and software are, it’s possible that your specific needs push the limits of their capabilities – or you have a complex application that needs several different processes to work together. In these cases, it’s time to think outside the box.

Using Python scripts to control AMASS can open up new possibilities in your procedures, allowing for greater flexibility, ease of use and efficiency. Scripts can complement the baseline functionality of AMASS, giving you many more options to work with without requiring you to code a full analysis, simulation or fitting procedure by yourself. Customization allows you to think more creatively about your analysis – to solve stubborn problems, or just to iron out the wrinkles that were keeping your processes less efficient than you’d like.

One great example of how integrating Python can provide extra value is by setting up an interface between AMASS and MATLAB, offering you a straightforward way to work with your data without extra steps.

Join us and get started easily!

We’re keen to spread the word about how helpful this can be – and we’re very happy that so many of you use AMASS in your daily work! – so we’ve decided to make this topic the focus of our next Ask an Expert! webinar. On September 15, our expert Andrey Zameshin will be taking a deep dive into how to optimize your AMASS workflows, including how to implement simple but powerful Python scripts.

Andrey will also be covering the common and not-so-common use cases of AMASS, what to do when your application isn’t fully covered by the software functionality, and more. So sign up here and join us on September 15 – it’s free of charge.

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