An incident-beam ionization chamber and charge integration system for stabilization of X-ray diffraction experiments

A low-absorption ionization chamber has been developed to monitor the incident beam in X-ray diffraction experiments. The chamber current is digitized by means of an ultra-stable linear charge integrator. The digital signal is used to control the measuring time for each point of the desired scattering curve. In our application, fluctuations in the scattering curve resulting from instability of the incident beam have been reduced by a factor of 5.