my suggestion is to learn some crystallography first and perhaps take one of the several available courses in XRD/Rietveld refinement. The Rietveld method and the corresponding software packages are not (or better, should not be used as) black boxes with an operating manual. Depending on what's the goal of the analysis, the Rietveld method can or could not be the right tool (as your powders are probably nano sized).

If you check online on the ccp14 website (http://www.ccp14.ac.uk) you might still find some useful information. Otherwise it is quite easy to google for Fullprof, GSAS, BGMN, Jana, Maud to find the corresponding websites with tutorials.

Again, be sure you know what you are doing and what is the physical meaning of the data you are obtaining before publishing the corresponding results!

my suggestion is to learn some crystallography first and perhaps take one of the several available courses in XRD/Rietveld refinement. The Rietveld method and the corresponding software packages are not (or better, should not be used as) black boxes with an operating manual. Depending on what's the goal of the analysis, the Rietveld method can or could not be the right tool (as your powders are probably nano sized).

If you check online on the ccp14 website (http://www.ccp14.ac.uk) you might still find some useful information. Otherwise it is quite easy to google for Fullprof, GSAS, BGMN, Jana, Maud to find the corresponding websites with tutorials.

Again, be sure you know what you are doing and what is the physical meaning of the data you are obtaining before publishing the corresponding results!

I agree with dr Leoni. You have to know what you are doing. As with all fitting procedures with a lot of parameters, you can fit an elephant into the mouse if you are persistent enough (c: So, sadly, there is no easy way. You'll have to learn at least basics of Rietveld before you start clicking around in Fullprof.

I do agree with comments above. You should learn the basics first. We use X'Pert Plus for the same. I may assist you with this tool, if you use it.

@Dinesh Dixit sir, I am thankful for your and Dr. Leoni's valuable advice. I want to learn the basics of Rietveld method. I just need to know from where to start. Please tell me, from i can get basic knowledge of Rietveld method. I don't have the X'pert Plus software, but i would like to use it. Please help me in this regard.

@Surbhi Ji........you can study the basics in the manual of the FullProf Suite toolbar.

there are indeed some good tutorial on the web, but this is not trivial... What do you want to measure? Answer this question and come back...

There are many web sites with the basics, advanced and examples on the use of the Rietveld method, there are many sites with FULLPROF examples too, and many tutorials on other Rietveld programs that would educate you also to use Fullprof, but getting a good book (The Rietveld Method by R.A. Young is an old but good starting book, or Fundamentals of Powder Diffraction and Structural characterization of materials by Pecharsky and Zavalij) and looking for a tutor would be much better. Find someone knowing crystallography in your university or look for a Rietveld school in your country or abroad. Many schools on the method are dictated yearly. There is even a Fullprof School runing soon at the ILL in Grenoble with Rodriguez Carvajal teaching. Rietveld refinement requires knowledge on a number of very specific concepts such as crystallography to understand the structure, diffraction to understand the parameters in the refinement and even some statistics to better understand the output of the refinement, so go step by step and you'll succeed. But learning all you need to know to be a decently independent user of the Rietveld Method may take you several months, if not years... but don't get discouraged, it's worth every second you spend learning it.

BTW, there are great crystallographers and experts in XRD and the Rietveld method in India, many of them also active in RG, so you should have no problem to find one close to you (even knowing you are in a big country)...

Best of luck

I fully agree with Dr. Leoni. One should be very cautious while using any crystallographic software and cross check is always better.

My experience is that Fullprof is the most user friendly software.

You should go through the manual and learn how to prepare data file and pcr files. Then you will need to know how to run the program and how to play with the various refinable parameters to fit your XRD data.

Good Luck

I don't think there is a scarcity of Rietveld experts worldwide but the conclusions folks come up with is at best ambivalent if not outright wrong. The root cause of such ambivalence is precisely what Matteo is referring to, I think. I've seen many such posts cautioning the user from using the "blackbox" approach to XRD techniques. Apparently, with no effect a century after the Braggs who performed most of their elegant work without all these modern crutches we presently have. The photographic film was the most sophisticated tool they needed to use in order to make their indelible contributions to science and humankind.

Here are some reasons from my perspective that such advice falls on "deaf ears" even now:

1. Users are unfamiliar with the fundamentals of XRD instrumentation and techniques as most use outside services for such purpose. The operators are not the users. The operators have limited materials knowledge. The users have limited familiarity with the experimental methods in XRD. I believe this gap may be bridged with modern 2D real time XRD data acquisition and display systems.

2. The traditional approaches to XRD data acquisition and specifically Rietveld analyses convolute signal over a large sampling area and detector (0D) surface. Thus, "smudging" the reciprocal space information and spatial information.

3. Conventional powder methods and most modern users of the XRD powder techniques are not taking advantage of the "whole pattern" approach that has significantly higher validity and precision in analyses.

4. Educational institutions will need to incorporate XRD in their curriculum for other disciplines of study besides metallurgy, materials science, chemistry, etc. The use of XRD has become interdisciplinary in the past 3-4 decades.

5. All the BS aside, YouTube is an excellent resource for information.  Please take advantage and do yourself a favor and do some "home schooling" on XRD. Here's a lecture through IUCr:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF5EHwMGJFc

There are many more wonderful resources on YouTube as well. If you are in india, then you'll have no challenges accessing YouTube unlike folks in other parts of the world suffering from Government censorship of citizen knowledge :-) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF5EHwMGJFc