On Thursday 7.9.23 and Friday 8.9.23 we had the joy to welcome STOE customers and „not-yet“ STOE customers to this year’s STOE User Meeting. Already before the first presentations began, people used the chance to catch up with friends and colleagues over a cup of coffee.

Jens Richter and Thomas Hartmann kicked off the morning with a lovely reunification between single crystal and powder diffraction over a combined instrument doing both! Then Anastasiia Sleptsova taught us about an impressive in-situ gas pump setup on a STADI P and Sebastian Bette brought clear evidence how the quality of in-house measurements of variable temperature experiments on stacking disordered samples has achieved equal quality as synchrotron measurements.

After a relaxed soup lunch – all white shirts survived – we continued to a splendid talk by Constantin Hoch on how and why we should all give more attention to absorption correction in our data. Followed by an invitation to have some fun with superstructures and some detective work on electron densities with Tom Nilges. To end the scientific talks on Thursday, Paolo Celani gave us a quick introduction on how to use the new Integrate 3D suite which will soon be available for X-Area – significantly improving data quality.

During the next hours we could directly chat with all the application scientists at STOE, ask specific questions and look at the machines in detail in the respective laboratories. Moreover, we had the opportunity to get into the depth of the works of WinX^POW and X-Area or follow a tour through the company, learn about STOE’s history and feel the weight of a raw metal Eulerian cradle.

At the end of this informative day, we all reconvened in the yard to crack open some beer barrels and enjoy STOE’s famous barbecue. In the lively atmosphere old friends could catch up and new friendships were made; young researchers got advice from mature scientists and new collaborations were forged in the heat of the barbecue. To cool off, a surprise came about later in the evening: a truck with delicious Italian ice cream. Everyone enjoyed their dessert, some foosball and rumor has it that the last people left way into the new day.

As is tradition, Friday morning started with our colleague Marcus Müller from DECTRIS, introducing their new Pilatus 4 detector and Laura Folkers offered a first glance on how it performs on a STADIVARI. They were followed by the introductory talks of our two new colleagues, John Kollath and Sergei Tumanov, telling us about their scientific origins and already showing a new part of the X-Area software, simplifying the integration of powder data measured on a STADIVARI. Just before the coffee break, we learnt from Sebastian Mangelsen how variable counting time can help improving count statistics at high angles in powder data to make structure solution by charge flipping possible.

After refueling with coffee, Julian Henn taught us about systematic errors and how we can understand and use them to build better structure models. The following talk by Katrin Beuthert took us to the world of Zintl Clusters where we were introduced to tremendous tungsten and thunderous titanium. The last scientific talk was given by this year’s representative of the DGK young crystallographers, Alena Shlyaykher, speaking about the crystallography and packings in selenium cyanates.

These exciting two days came to a close with a light lunch and some more time for everyone to discuss and catch up.