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Concept
Atomic form factor
Summary
In physics, the atomic form factor, or atomic scattering factor, is a measure of the scattering amplitude of a wave by an isolated atom. The atomic form factor depends on the type of scattering, which in turn depends on the nature of the incident radiation, typically X-ray, electron or neutron. The common feature of all form factors is that they involve a Fourier transform of a spatial density distribution of the scattering object from real space to momentum space (also known as reciprocal space). For an object with spatial density distribution, , the form factor, , is defined as
where is the spatial density of the scatterer about its center of mass (), and is the momentum transfer. As a result of the nature of the Fourier transform, the broader the distribution of the scatterer in real space , the narrower the distribution of in ; i.e., the faster the decay of the form factor.
For crystals, atomic form factors are used to calculate the structure factor for a given Bragg peak of a crystal.
X-rays are scattered by the electron cloud of the atom and hence the scattering amplitude of X-rays increases with the atomic number, , of the atoms in a sample. As a result, X-rays are not very sensitive to light atoms, such as hydrogen and helium, and there is very little contrast between elements adjacent to each other in the periodic table. For X-ray scattering, in the above equation is the electron charge density about the nucleus, and the form factor the Fourier transform of this quantity. The assumption of a spherical distribution is usually good enough for X-ray crystallography.
In general the X-ray form factor is complex but the imaginary components only become large near an absorption edge. Anomalous X-ray scattering makes use of the variation of the form factor close to an absorption edge to vary the scattering power of specific atoms in the sample by changing the energy of the incident x-rays hence enabling the extraction of more detailed structural information.
Atomic form factor patterns are often represented as a function of the magnitude of the scattering vector .
Official source
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