In x-ray crystallography, Bragg-ing is not a bad thing

Ok. That's a fairly bad pun. Seriously, though the father-son team of William Lawrence and William Henry Bragg are inseparable from the modern understanding of x-ray diffraction. In a previous post, I had talked about how we use x-ray diffraction. I just came across a series of comic strips that describe many other ways of using x-ray diffraction. Many of the techniques discussed in these comic strips discuss techniques that are used to study single-crystalline samples (samples with only one crystal in the entire chunk--just think the placement of a single atom fully describes the location of all other atoms in the single crystal). Some people in our research group investigate thin films of single-crystalline material using similar techniques that are best for these really small samples. These comics were made by Maki Naro for the Boxplot blog in Popular Science.

Also, here is in interview of the daughter of Bragg, Jr. about her father and grandfather's discoveries.