Patent ID: 8600004

Claim:
A method for obtaining the structure factor of an amorphous material on the basis of a spectrum of X-ray scattering inside a specimen of said material recorded experimentally, at least one X-ray being emitted as an incident ray toward said specimen and reflected toward a detector, the incident X-ray scanning the surface of the specimen according to a given angle of incidence, comprising: a step of recording experimental photon intensity measurements performed by the detector as a function of the angle of incidence; a step of correcting the experimental intensity, taking into account at least the absorption phenomena inside the specimen, the amount of intensity absorbed at each measurement being dependent on the penetration length l of the incident wave inside the specimen before reflection; a normalization step referring the corrected intensity arising from the experimental intensity to an electron intensity according to a normalization coefficient (α); a step of calculating a discretized function Q.i(Q), i being a reduced intensity, which is the ratio (I cd /I ci ) of the reflected dependent coherent intensity over the reflected independent coherent intensity, arising from the measurements of the corrected and normalized experimental intensity and Q being the modulus of the wave scattering vector proportional to the quantity (sin θ)/λ, 2θ being the scattering angle and λ being the length of the wave emitted, the normalization constant (α) varying in a recursive manner so as to minimize the slope of the affine straight line obtained by linear regression over the values of the function Q.i(Q), during each iteration the values of the reduced intensity being calculated for a penetration length l, the function Q.i(Q) sought corresponding to the minimum slope; and a step of determining the structure factor on the basis of the distribution of the radial atomic concentration ρ(r) dependent on Q.i(Q).