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.

Nota Bene: this is a wiki, which means that you can (and are encouraged to) modify or add pages to the wiki. This is particularly true for the tutorials and feature requests pages. To learn more about how to modify or add pages to the wiki, look at the HelpContents page, and experiment on the WikiSandBox page.

Beginning with Fox


The FOX program (for Linux, MacOS X 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,...

Getting Fox

Documentation for Fox


Using Fox to solve Crystal structures

Fox Development

None: FoxWiki (last edited 2008-03-08 23:02:44 by localhost)