Chapter 8.2 Laue crystallography: time-resolved studies

The term ‘Laue diffraction’ describes the process of X-ray scattering that occurs when a stationary crystal is illuminated by a polychromatic beam of X-rays. Recent developments in Laue diffraction have depended on three main advances: the use of very intense polychromatic synchrotron sources; the realization that the so-called energy-overlap or overlapping-orders problem in Laue diffraction is theoretically tractable, of limited extent and could be overcome experimentally; and the development of appropriate algorithms and suitable software to address the energy-overlap, spatial-overlap and wavelength-normalization problems. This chapter covers the principles of Laue diffraction, practical considerations in the Laue technique and time-resolved experiments.

Keywords: Laue diffraction; data redundancy; radiation damage; synchrotron radiation; time-resolved studies; wavelength normalization curve