On the Investigation of the Structure of Amorphous Substances by Means of Electron Diffraction

Abstract

A “Scanning High Energy Electron Diffraction”-(SHEED-)apparatus is described with which the intensity curves of elastically scattered electrons are obtained within a few minutes. The elimination of the inelastic background is done by means of an electrostatic filter with an energy resolution of 104, which is only limited by the line width of the beam producing system. The intensity curves obtained experimentally are corrected for multiple scattering. The pair correlation functions of amorphous Germanium as obtained by electron and X-ray diffraction are compared. The electron diffraction curves agree well with the corresponding curves of other authors. The same stands for the curves obtained with X-rays. The differences between the curves obtained with electrons and X-rays are discussed.