Discovering Planar Disorder in Close-Packed Structures from X-Ray Diffraction: Beyond the Fault Model

Abstract

We solve a longstanding problem--determining structural information for disordered materials from their diffraction spectra--for the case of planar disorder in close-packed structures (CPSs). Our solution offers the most complete possible statistical description of the disorder, and, from it, we find the minimum effective memory length of disordered stacking sequences. We also compare our model of disorder with the so-called fault model (FM) and demonstrate that in simple cases our approach reduces to the FM, but in cases that are more complex it provides a general and more accurate structural description than the FM. We demonstrate our technique on two previously published zinc sulphide diffraction spectra.