XRD Instrument Sensitivity Results from a Round Robin Study

Abstract

During the course of the past ten years the International Centre for Diffraction Data has sponsored a number of “Round Robin” tests to evaluate the quality of experimental X-ray diffraction data [1-5]. The latest of this series, called the Instrument Parameter Round Robin, was designed to evaluate, among other things, relative angularly-dependent sensitivity differences between diffractometers. Previous experiments have indicated that even perfectly aligned diffractometers of the same generic type, do not necessarily give the same set of relative intensities. One objective of the round robin was to quantify the magnitude of the experimental differences between data sets, and to demonstrate a means for external calibration of diffractometers, so that digitized diffraction intensity data obtained from different instruments could be directly compared.