A Hybrid Angular/Energy Dispersive Method to Improve Some Characteristics of Laboratory X-Ray Diffraction

The Energy Dispersive X-ray Diffraction, generally referred as EDXD, has shown to be a valid alternative to the conventional Angular Dispersive X-ray Diffraction, the ADXD. EDXD exhibits several advantages to its AD counterpart, mainly related to the properties of the polychromatic X-ray beam utilized for diffracting, such as higher signal intensities, a wider accessible region of the reciprocal space, a greater transparency of samples, and a parallel data collection of the q-points in the diffraction pattern acquisition. However, the main drawback of poly-chromaticity lays in the fact that the quantities that modulate the scattered intensity in a diffraction measurement depend on the energy. These quantities are the primary X-ray beam spectrum, polarization, and X-ray absorption, the last producing by far the most critical effect because it rapidly changes as a function of energy. Therefore, a detailed knowledge of the energy dependence of all these quantities is required in EDXD in order to process the data correctly and prevent systematic errors. The difficulty in handling the energy-dependent factors complicates the experimental procedure and may make the measurements unreliable. In the present paper, a hybrid method between the ED and AD X-ray Diffraction is proposed to maintain the advantages of the polychromatic nature of the radiation utilized in EDXD, while preventing the problems produced by the energy-dependent quantities.