Author(s)

Guenter Johannes Goerigk

Institute of Soft Matter and Functional Materials, Helmholtz-Zentrum-Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

In the last three decades Synchrotron radiation became an indispensable experimental tool for chemical and structural analysis of nano-scaled properties in solid state physics, chemistry, materials science and life science thereby rendering the explanation of the macroscopic behavior of the materials and systems under investigation. Especially the techniques known as Anomalous Small-Angle X-ray Scattering provide deep insight into the materials structural architecture according to the different chemical components on lengths scales starting just above the atomic scale (≈1 nm) up to several 100 nm. The techniques sensitivity to the different chemical components makes use of the energy dependence of the atomic scattering factors, which are different for all chemical elements, thereby disentangling the nanostructure of the different chemical components by the signature of the elemental X-ray absorption edges i.e. by employing synchrotron radiation. The paper wants to focus on the application of an algorithm from linear algebra in the field of synchrotron radiation. It provides a closer look to the algebraic prerequisites, which govern the system of linear equations established by these experimental techniques and its solution by solving the eigenvector problem. The pair correlation functions of the so-called basic scattering functions are expressed as a linear combination of eigenvectors.

Matrix Inversion; Eigenvalues; Eigenvectors; Pair Correlation Functions; Basic Scattering Functions

G. Goerigk, "The Solution of the Eigenvector Problem in Synchrotron Radiation Based Anomalous Small-Angle X-Ray Scattering," Advances in Linear Algebra & Matrix Theory, Vol. 3 No. 4, 2013, pp. 59-68. doi: 10.4236/alamt.2013.34012.