Investigation of the Experimental Effects on the Quality of the Rapid Acquisition Pair Distribution Function (RA-PDF) Data

Series of experiments have been carried out to investigate the quality of the recently developed rapid acquisition atomic pair distribution function (RA-PDF) method, which combines the uses of high energy X-rays and an image plate area detector. Image plate data for simple elements (C, Mg, Al, Si, Ni, Cu, Zn, Ag, and Pb) have been analyzed, using (RA-PDF) technique. The affect of undiscriminated Compton and fluorescence is investigated for a wide range of materials with atomic Z numbers ranging from 6 (Carbon) and 82 (Pb). We find the RA-PDF method is capable of obtaining high quality PDFs where quantitatively reliable structure information can be extracted.