Symposium on electron diffraction studies of solids and gases

A symposium on Electron Diffraction Studies of Solids and Gases was held July 17–19 at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, following the Fourth General Assembly and International Congress of the International Union of Crystallography. This is the first meeting at which there has been wide representation of laboratories active in the field of electron diffraction, and there can be no doubt that the participants have obtained both a better understanding and appreciation of one another's work and also a better oriented view of the field as a whole. This Symposium was typical in the sense that much more was learned from informal discussions than from formal papers. For this reason in this review an attempt is made to summarize current problems and areas of research in the field of electron diffraction, rather than to review one by one the papers presented. It seems expedient to discuss the developments in electron diffraction of gases separately from those in electron diffraction of crystalline solids, since the experimental and theoretical problems are generally quite different.