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 con-ventional 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 intensi-ties, 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 quan-tities are the primary X-ray beam spectrum, polarization, and X-ray absorption, the last producing by far the most criti-cal 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 dif-ficulty in handling the energy-dependent factors complicates the experimental procedure and may make the measure-ments unreliable. In the present paper, a hybrid method between the ED and AD X-ray Diffraction is proposed to main-tain the advantages of the polychromatic nature of the radiation utilized in EDXD, while preventing the problems pro-duced by the energy-dependent quantities