Experimental Methods for Local Structure Determination on the Atomic Scale

TL;DRAbstract

It is generally agreed that for a fundamental understanding of the properties of the condensed state it is necessary to know the composition and arrangement of the atoms in the material. In this article I will review the main experimental techniques for directly determining the local structure of materials in the condensed state with emphasis on the type of information each technique determines and the strengths and limitations in obtaining such information. The theory of the structure information obtained by the experimental techniques is already well known and only that aspect of it related to the focus of this review will be presented here. The most generally employed method is coherent scattering of either x-rays or neutrons. The most common application of the technique is on crystals where the scattering is peaked about discrete directions corresponding to Bragg peaks. By an appropriate analysis of the intensity and line shapes of only the Bragg peaks one can obtain the average pe

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