Chapter 2 Electron diffraction: A combination with other techniques

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the major milestones of the evolution of gas-phase electron diffraction (GED) during the seven decades of its history focusing at the interactions of this method with other techniques. GED has its own inherent weaknesses and unique strengths. Its data are often insufficient to provide all the necessary information for a full evaluation of the structure of any but the smallest molecule. Therefore, interactions with other methods have been found useful to increase the power of GED and extend its range of application. These interactions are of two different kinds. The first type of interaction occurs at the experimental level and implies some modifications of standard GED equipment. The second type of interaction refers to the way the experimental GED data are treated and it implies the inclusion of some additional information from independent sources of both experimental and computational nature. Both of them describe the standard GED equipment and standard structure analysis. The chapter also provides an overview of the electron diffraction method. It describes the experimental equipment followed by the basic equations of GED and structure analysis. As a logical consequence, it describes the changes in running the GED experiment and characterizes those modifications, which are used in a combined structure analysis.