Deterministic fractals: Extracting additional information from small-angle scattering data

Abstract

The small-angle scattering curves of deterministic mass fractals are studied and analyzed in momentum space. In the fractal region, the curve I(q)q(D) is found to be log-periodic with good accuracy, and the period is equal to the scaling factor of the fractal. Here, D and I(q) are the fractal dimension and the scattering intensity, respectively. The number of periods of this curve coincides with the number of fractal iterations. We show that the log-periodicity of I(q)q(D) in the momentum space is related to the log-periodicity of the quantity g(r)r(3-D) in the real space, where g(r) is the pair distribution function. The minima and maxima positions of the scattering intensity are estimated explicitly by relating them to the pair distance distribution in real space. It is shown that the minima and maxima are damped with increasing polydispersity of the fractal sets; however, they remain quite pronounced even at sufficiently large values of polydispersity. A generalized self-similar Vicsek fractal with controllable fractal dimension is introduced, and its scattering properties are studied to illustrate the above findings. In contrast with the usual methods, the present analysis allows us to obtain not only the fractal dimension and the edges of the fractal region, but also the fractal iteration number, the scaling factor, and the number of structural units from which the fractal is composed.