The Benefits of Beam Path Evacuation for Data Quality Improvements in X-ray diffraction
By evacuating parts of the beam path in X-ray diffraction (XRD), the data quality can be improved significantly by reducing the loss of intensity and parasitic radiation caused by air scattering. This is especially important for lower energy X-ray sources such as Cr or Co.
In most lab sized X-ray diffractometers users are regularly faced with the difficult choice of the best instrument radius for their measurements. Since there is an inverse relationship between the angular resolution, which improves at larger radii, and signal-to-noise ratio, which is better at lower radii, users have to settle for a trade-off in data quality for their measurements. This is especially problematic for precise structural investigations, which require high angular precision, of samples that contain minor phases, which are only detectable with a sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio.
Air scattering describes the interaction between X-ray photons and gas molecules in the beam. While the elements contained in air are usually light, and show very low density, their impact can still be significant. The problem of air scattering is two-fold. Firstly, the intensities of the primary X-ray beam and of the diffracted beams are reduced by the interaction with the gas molecules.
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