If everything fails...

There are cases where it is impossible to get suitable single crystals for structure determination but it is still possible to get crystalline powders. Techniques in ab initio structure determination from powder diffraction are nowadays so elaborate that they can be considered as an alternative.

For good quality results you should use synchrotron and/or neutron radiation. The access to these radiation facilities is still limited and rather expensive. The advise given here is therefore to take every effort to achieve single crystals before thinking about powder diffraction as a tool for structure determination.

A database of structure determination from powder data can be found on the web:

Structure Determination from Powder Diffraction - Database


Page maintained by Martin Lutz. Last change 19-Sep-16.
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