ABSTRACT
Powder diffraction is a technique using X-ray diffraction on powder or microcrystalline samples for the structural analysis of materials. It is most widely used for the phase identification of a crystalline material and can provide information on unit cell dimensions. The primary use of powder diffraction lies in the identification and characterization of crystalline solids, each of which produces a distinctive diffraction pattern. A structure is first assumed to theoretically calculate its diffraction pattern and the calculated pattern is compared with the observed one. In X-ray diffraction, the incident beam, plane normal, and diffracted beam are always coplanar. Powder X-ray diffraction is mostly used to characterize and identify phases, and to refine already known structures rather than to solve unknown structures. The powder diffractometry enables a direct determination of the Bragg angle of every cone of diffracted X-rays. The diffraction peaks with all even indices are much stronger than those with all odd indices.
