An automatic analysis of strain-depth profile in X-ray microdiffraction

The increased demanding of high spatial resolution analysis for local strain/stress measurements gave an impulse for developing new X-ray microdiffraction technique. In particular spatial resolution of the order of 100-300nm can be recently obtained using an X-ray waveguides as optical element. However, the great number of datasets which must be acquired and analyzed to probe the full field of strain variations renders the high-resolution technique not suitable for systematic analysis. In this communication, we present a data treatment procedure for an automatic analysis of microdiffraction profiles measured with X-ray waveguide to obtain quantitative information about local strain variations. The presented procedure allows to extract a depth-dependent strain profile directly from the measured data to be used as initial guess for calculating the diffraction profile by means of the dynamical theory in the Takagi-Taupin recursive formalism. Then a Monte Carlo fitting data refinement is applied to optimize the strain profile. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.