Billinge & Farrow Paper Highlighted in IUCr Newsletter

The paper “Relationship between the atomic pair distribution function and small-angle scattering: implications for modeling of nanoparticles” by Christopher L. Farrow and Prof. Simon Billinge, which recently appeared in Acta Crystallographica Section A: Foundations of Crystallography, has been selected as a highlight article for the summer newsletter of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr).

One of the great challenges in nanoscience is to solve the structure, or internal atomic arrangement, of nanoparticles. One promising approach is atomic pair distribution function (PDF) analysis which gives the internal arrangements of atoms from ensembles of identical particles. Another widely used approach is to study the small-angle x-ray or neutron scattering (SAS) from nanoparticles, which gives information about the size and shape of the nanoparticle but not the internal arrangement.

In this paper, Farrow and Billinge formally rederived the PDF equations and related them explicitly to the equations from small angle scattering.  This will allow SAS and PDF data from the same samples to be explicitly compared.