Experimental realization of the simulated scenario of differently oriented layers on top of each other.

Two wooden skewers were put on top of each other and examined with respect to different relative orientations. Because the fibers of the wood form highly oriented substructures parallel to one skewer's central axis each skewer strongly scatters in a well-defined direction perpendicular to its central axis. The color scale has been adapted to increase the contrast for the transmission images. Compared to the rather weak absorption of the material the dark-field signal clearly predominates for this kind of sample. Shown in the middle row, the mean value of the dark-field signal with respect to the rotation simply is the product of the mean values of each skewer, as it is for the transmission depicted above. In the bottom row the anisotropy images encode the direction of the structures in the color and the degree of anisotropy in the brightness. For completely parallel orientation of the two skewers () the superposition shows the same orientation. For an angle of between them, the resulting signal depends on the amount of material penetrated by the beam. Wherever both thicknesses are equal the measured orientation is exactly the circular mean of both individual orientations. Otherwise intermediate orientations appear wherever the penetrated thickness of one of both skewers is larger than for the other. For an angle of and equal thicknesses the anisotropy signal completely cancels out. Length of the scalebar: .