Rietveld Refinement: A Technique More than Just Identification

Abstract

Powder diffraction analysis and the data profile fitting represent the phase identification of a crystalline material which gives information about its unit cell dimensions. In a polycrystalline sample it is inevitable that certain information is lost as a result of the random orientation of the crystallites. So whole Pattern fitting Structure Refinement is now widely accepted to be an exceptionally valuable method for structural analysis of nearly all classes of crystalline materials not available as single crystals. Least squares approach which means manually refining a model to match experimental data can be said as Rietveld analysis which is an extended refinement analysis of a given diffraction data.