Laue Crystallography for Studying Rapid Reactions

Precise quantitation of static and time-resolved Laue diffraction patterns is undeniably more complex than for monochromatic patterns. Recent advances in integration and scaling algorithms demonstrate that, with suitable care in the conduct of the Laue experiment itself, Laue data sets can be obtained which rival the best monochromatic data sets in accuracy and completeness. These algorithms deal in an integrated fashion with the several main problems of Laue diffraction patterns: the elongated spots which arise from mosaic crystals, the spatial overlaps which occur in crowded diffraction patterns, the energy overlaps which arise from the mapping of a central line in reciprocal space onto a single spot in detector space, and wavelength normalization.