Elementary Scattering Theory: For X-Ray and Neutron Users

This is an open access title. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence. It is available to read and download as a PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform.

The opportunities for doing scattering experiments at synchrotron and neutron facilities have grown rapidly in recent years and are set to continue to do so into the foreseeable future. This text provides a basic understanding of how these techniques enable the structure and dynamics of materials to be studied at the atomic and molecular level. Although mathematics cannot be avoided in a theoretical discussion, the aim has been to write a book that most scientists will still find approachable. To this end, the first two chapters are devoted to providing a tutorial background in the mathematics and physics that are implicitly assumed in other texts. Thereafter, the philosophy has been one of keeping things as simple as possible.

Dr. Sivia studied for his degrees at Cambridge University and then did post-doctoral work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was a staff scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and a College Lecturer at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, for many years before becoming a Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford. In addition to the present text, he has co-authored three books on Mathematics and Physics in the Oxford Chemistry Primers Series, and a book on Bayesian Data Analysis.