An Absorption Correction for Reliable Pair-Distribution Functions from Low Energy X-ray Sources

This paper explores the development and testing of a simple absorption correction model for processing x-ray powder diffraction data from Debye-Scherrer geometry laboratory x-ray experiments. This may be used as a pre-processing step before using PDFgetX3 to obtain reliable pair distribution functions (PDFs). Various experimental and theoretical methods for estimating muR were explored, and the most appropriate muR values for correction were identified for different capillary diameters and x-ray beam sizes. We identify operational ranges of muR where reasonable signal to noise is possible after correction. A user-friendly software package, diffpy.labpdfproc, is presented that can help estimate muR and perform absorption corrections, with a rapid calculation for efficient processing.