Kinematic diffraction is the approach to study diffraction phenomena by neglecting

multiple scattering Scattering is a term used in physics to describe a wide range of physical processes where moving particles or radiation of some form, such as light or sound, are forced to deviate from a straight trajectory by localized non-uniformities (including ...

. For linear

wave equation The (two-way) wave equation is a second-order linear partial differential equation for the description of waves or standing wave fields — as they occur in classical physics — such as mechanical waves (e.g. water waves, sound waves and s ...

s, it thus consists in summing the contribution of the partial waves emanating from the different scatterers, where only the incident field drives the scattering. As a consequence, the far-field amplitude essentially corresponds to the

Fourier transform A Fourier transform (FT) is a mathematical transform that decomposes functions into frequency components, which are represented by the output of the transform as a function of frequency. Most commonly functions of time or space are transformed, ...

of the scattering length density. It is typically understood as the

Born approximation Generally in scattering theory and in particular in quantum mechanics, the Born approximation consists of taking the incident field in place of the total field as the driving field at each point in the scatterer. The Born approximation is named a ...

applied to a regular arrangement of scatterers, as appropriate for

X-ray crystallography X-ray crystallography is the experimental science determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to diffract into many specific directions. By measuring the angle ...

. The corresponding full (non-perturbative) theory is called the

dynamical theory of diffraction The dynamical theory of diffraction describes the interaction of waves with a regular lattice. The wave fields traditionally described are X-rays, neutrons or electrons and the regular lattice are atomic crystal structures or nanometer-scale mul ...

References

{{CMP-stub Diffraction