Fox Wiki

Welcome to the Fox wiki ! Fox, 'Free Objects for Crystallography' is a free, open-source program for the ab initio structure determination from powder diffraction.



Beginning with Fox

Introduction

The FOX program (for Linux, macOS and windows) was made for the ab initio crystal structure solution from diffraction data (mostly powder diffraction data). Its most interesting features for ab initio structure determination are:

So, if you:

Then Fox can help you.

This program can be used also for educational purposes, to show a 3D display of Crystal structures, and the associated powder pattern(s) (see how adding atoms, changing the lattice, or changing the spacegroup affects the powder spectrum and the 3D structure).

If you would also like to choose your own criterion and algorithm to solve the structure, then it will be even better : FOX is built on a very customizable and expandable library (ObjCryst++), which allows you to evaluate your Crystal structure following a combination of criteria: currently available are the diffraction data Chi2, an anti-bump and a bond-valence cost function, but it would be very easy to write a new criterion using (say) interatomic distances (energy of the configuration, analysis of the coordination). This, with a versatile way to describe the unit cell's contents, is what makes the algorithms used interesting. For example you can combine several datasets (X-Ray, Neutron...) for the same structure,...

Note that you can also try most of Fox/ObCryst features in Python notebooks using pyobcryst: see the online documentation and don't miss the example notebooks.

Getting Fox

Documentation for Fox

Bibliography

Using Fox to solve Crystal structures

Fox Development

None: FoxWiki (last edited 2022-05-26 13:12:59 by VincentFavreNicolin)