Abstract
Recent studies of seismic travel times and free oscillations have been interpreted in terms of an anisotropic inner core with cylindrical symmetry aligned with the earth's axis of rotation. The inner core is believed to consist of hexagonal close‐packed (hcp) iron. In this letter the velocity anisotropy is used to determine the coefficients Wlmn of a series expansion of the crystallite orientation distribution function in generalised spherical harmonics. This function gives the probability of a crystallite having a given orientation with respect to a set of axes fixed in the core. The solution to this problem enables construction of crystallographic pole figures, which suggest a strong alignment of hcp Fe c‐axes along the earth's axis of rotation.
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