ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a broad subject, including crystallography, production, detection, characteristics, and practical use of X-rays. It presents a brief overview of crystallography: how atoms are arranged in space of crystals and how it is mathematically described. The chapter also deals with X-rays, how they are produced, and how they can be detected. It discusses the practical use of diffraction, which including measurement of basic parameters, such as crystallite size. Diffraction is essentially a scattering phenomenon, in which a large number of atoms cooperate. Crystallite size can be determined with X-ray diffraction technique using the Scherrer and Hall method. The described methods relate primarily to the study of polycrystalline materials, and studies of monocrystals have been deliberately excluded. The X-ray diffractometers use different detectors: Geiger-Muller, proportional, scintillation, and semiconductor. Semiconductor detectors produce pulses proportional to the absorbed X-ray energy.
