Hi folks, first of all thanks to all of you who attended the XAFS XII for an interesting conference with lots of input and new ideas. But now to my question: I have been guessing for a long time of doing an algorithm of doing some kind of potential surface scanning when doing an EXAFS fit. This procedure has been known in e.g. ab initio codes like GAUSSIAN for a long time and can be used to check if you are really in a global minimum on the potential surface. As EXAFS analysis is the ultimate search for a global minimum in the parameter space, but you never know if you really end up there, I was planning to do such kind of investigations. However, before I start off with wild coding :) I want to have more opinions on this topic. Here are my main points speaking for this kind of algorithm: 1) Computer power is quite fast now - and ifeffit is also really fast in computing the fit quality if you do not guess any variable (which you don't need in this case as you vary the parameters by your own). 2) In cases where you would expect large correlations between certain variables (e.g. when you have overlapping shells at nearly the same distance), one could systematically investigate the influence of small changes in the parameter space on the fit. That's it - now I am really keen on knowing what you think of this idea. Cheers, Norbert -- Dr. rer. nat. Norbert Weiher (norbertweiher@yahoo.de) Laboratory for Technical Chemistry - ETH Hönggerberg HCI E 117 - 8093 Zürich - Phone: +41 1 63 3 48 32