Instrument line shape method

It is proposed to recapitulate the basic physical and optical principles of spectroscopy in this review. For the comparison of different methods, we concentrate on the determination of wavelength as an essential part of spectroscopy. We also comment on the power of resolution of the various instruments and the instrument line-shape function. 

In principle all the X-ray emission methods can give chemical state information from small shifts and line shape changes (cf, XPS and AES in Chapter 5). Though done for molecular studies to derive electronic structure information, this type of work is rarely done for materials analysis. The reasons are the instrumental resolution of commercial systems is not adequate and the emission lines routinely used for elemental analysis are often not those most useftil for chemical shift meas-ure-ments. The latter generally involve shallower levels (narrower natural line widths), meaning longer wavelength (softer) X-ray emission. 

When a powder is examined, many diffracted beams overlap, (see Section 6.11), so that the procedure of structure determination is more difficult. In particular this makes space group determination less straightforward. Nevertheless, powder diffraction data is now used routinely to determine the structures of new materials. An important technique used to solve structures from powder diffraction data is that of Rietveld refinement. In this method, the exact shape of each diffraction line, called the profile, is calculated and matched with the experimental data. Difficulties arise not only because of overlapping reflections, but also because instrumental factors add significantly to the profile of a diffracted beam. Nevertheless, Rietveld refinement of powder diffraction patterns is routinely used to determine the structures of materials that cannot readily be prepared in a form suitable for single crystal X-ray study. 

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