Kinematic diffraction

Kinematic diffraction is an approximation for diffraction of waves. It assumes that the waves are only scattered once, neglecting multiple scattering. For linear wave equations, it involves summing the contribution of the partial waves emanating from different scatterers, where only the incident field drives the scattering. As a consequence, the far-field amplitude essentially corresponds to the Fourier transform of the scattering length density, which would be the charge density for x-rays and the electrostatic potential for electrons. It is typically understood as the Born approximation applied to a number of scatterers, and as such is often used for X-ray crystallography. The corresponding full theory is called the dynamical theory of diffraction. For x-rays and in electron diffraction different approaches are used to calculating the dynamical diffraction for transmission with high-energy electrons as well as for low energy electron diffraction or reflection high-energy electron diffraction