SMALL-ANGLE SCATTERING AND CHORD LENGTH DISTRIBUTION

Wilfried Gille

Department of Physics, Martin-Luther-University Halle- Wittenberg, X-Ray laboratory, Hoher Weg 8, 06114 Halle, Germany

Keywords: Chord length distribution, m-randomness, non- convex geometric figure, Couchy theorem , stereology

In material research microheterogeneities of selected materials are investigated by scattering methods. One of the structure functions of such experiments is the chord length distribution. Chord length distributions are defined for any geometric object and reflect the size and the shape of the object. In this light the chord distribution of a geometric body is similar to a fingerprint of the corresponding shape. The characterization of many particle systems can be achieved by comparing experimental chord distributions with theoretical ones, provided the latter are available with high precision for many fundamental shapes.