Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2011
Third generation hard x-ray synchrotron sources and new x-ray optics have revolutionized x-ray microbeams. Now intense sub-micron x-ray beams are routinely available for x-ray diffraction measurement. An important application of sub-micron xray beams is analyzing polycrystalline material by measuring the diffraction of individual grains. For these measurements, conventional analysis methods will not work. The most suitable method for microdiffraction on polycrystalline samples is taking broad-bandpass or white-beam Laue images. With this method, the crystal orientation and non-isostatic strain can be measured rapidly without rotation of sample or detector. The essential step is indexing the reflections from more than one grain. An algorithm has recently been developed to index broad bandpass Laue images from multi-grain samples. For a single grain, a unique set of indices is found by comparing measured angles between Laue reflections and angles between possible indices derived from the x-ray energy bandpass and the scattering angle 2 theta. This method has been extended to multigrain diffraction by successively indexing points not recognized in preceding indexing iterations. This automated indexing method can be used in a wide range of applications.