@Vladimir Starostin
We are pleased to announce that one of our members, Vladimir Starostin, presented our work as an invited speaker at the 17th International Conference on Surface X-ray and Neutron Scattering (SXNS17) hosted by the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) and the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France.
X-ray and neutron reflectometry are key techniques for analyzing surfaces, thin films, and multilayer structures across different scientific domains. Like most scattering techniques, X-ray and neutron reflectometry do not capture phase information (the so-called "phase problem"). This leads to ambiguity: multiple potential structures are consistent with the measured data. Conventional methods generally settle for just one of the possible solutions and cannot estimate how likely it is that it is the correct one, leading to unreliable conclusions.
We employ recent simulation-based inference (SBI) methods to enable, for the first time, fast and reliable Bayesian solutions for reflectometry that captures all the potential structures consistent with the data and the prior knowledge of experimentasists (see our previous blog post and stay tuned for the oncoming paper!).
We were truly overwhelmed by the positive feedback and are already working to make user-friendly software available to the reflectometry community. We look forward to seeing fast, reliable Bayesian inference become part of the routine reflectometry analysis at laboratories, as well as at neutron and synchrotron facilities around the world!