Our group will soon have access to a state-of-the-art Rigaku SmartLab X-ray Diffractometer thanks to a new National Science Foundation grant through the Major Research Instrumentation program. Dr. Comes, Prof. Byron Farnum in Chemistry (a FINO Lab collaborator on our NSF project), and Profs. Majid Beidaghi, Peng Li, Tae-Sik Oh, and Masoud Mahjouri-Samani in the College of Engineering collaborated on the proposal. Each group will benefit from access to the system for X-ray reflectometry, reciprocal space maps, and high-resolution X-ray diffraction (XRD) of thin film materials. It will be the only high-resolution XRD in a university in the state of Alabama with an area detector for rapid data acquisition. The system will be installed during February and March and will be open to users from around the region as well as undergraduate students participating in the Auburn Collaborative Approaches Among Scientist and Engineers REU program. If outside users are interested in performing experiments, please contact Dr. Comes by email.