The mathematical methods for the analysis of diffraction data only apply to patterns, which in turn result only when waves diffract from orderly arrays.
In the late 1940s he demonstrated that the symmetry elements of a crystal structure can be deduced from observed diffraction data.
They explored alternative approaches including Debye methods, which relate the atomic arrangement to the diffraction data without recourse to symmetry.
Depending on how strong the negative feedback is there can more often be more than one solution for any set of diffraction data.
Small-molecule diffraction data extends to much higher resolution than feasible for macromolecules, and has a very clean mathematical relationship between the data and the atomic model.
The effects of preferred orientation such as wire textures on the diffraction data may be significantly reduced without the need for any sample preparation.
The name itself comes from the field of x-ray crystallography, where the phase problem has to be solved for the determination of a structure from diffraction data.
This continues until the correlation between the diffraction data and the model is maximized.
During that period, he studied x-ray diffraction data for insulin crystals.
GSAS is a very widely used crystallographic data analysis program for fitting structures to single-crystal and powder diffraction data.