Position-sensitive detectors in single-crystal diffractometry

Abstract

Abstract One of the most significant recent advances in singlecrystal neutron diffractometry has been the introduction of one- and two-dimensional (2-D) position-sensitive detectors (PSD's). The first PSD's on monochromatic beams were relatively large being intended primarily for measurement of a large number of Bragg reflections simultaneously, especially in macromolecular crystallography (1). It soon became obvious though that such detectors could also offer several advantages for measurement of single reflections, and smaller PSD's of higher resolution are being introduced for crystallographic studies of smaller unit cells (2). At pulsed neutron sources PSD's have virtually become mandatory for efficient data collection using time-of-flight techniques (3). Hardware aspects are covered extensively in recent reviews (43). In this article some geometrical aspects peculiar to measurements with PSD's are discussed and a brief review is given of applications of PSD' s to single-crystal diffractometry.