The application Diffraction is an interactive demonstration of the basis of single crystal and powder diffraction. It was ported to Java in July 2011 under the name jDiffraction.

This page mainly concerns the original version developed for Mac OS.

Version 3.3,   Price: Free
Mac OS X (Universal Binary, runs natively on PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs.)
Copyright 1994-2006, ILL, A. Filhol
All Rights Reserved

Diffraction offers an interactive demonstration of the basis of single crystal diffraction and powder diffraction.
Diffraction is aimed at science teachers and students and also for the general public.
Diffraction is trilingual (English, French, German).
Diffraction is currently Mac OS X only (10.3 or higher)
        --> Download Diffraction   [Diffraction-v3.dmg] 6.7Mb  or  [Diffraction-v3.sit] 2.2Mb
        --> Download the Manual :  [Diffraction_Manual.pdf]
A multi-plateform (Java) version is foreseen.

Program description:

1- Laue diffraction (diffraction of a polychromatic beam by a single crystal)
You can appreciate the relationship between the diffraction pattern and both the lattice symmetry and the crystal orientation.

2- Lattice planes
You can sense the relationship between atom planes and the diffraction process. The interactivity makes it easy to demonstrate the link between single crystal diffraction and powder diffraction. This is especially true if a fixed-angle sample rotation is used.

3- Diffraction of a monochromatic beam by a single crystal
This demonstrates the influence of the wavelength on the diffraction process.

4- Diffraction of a monochromatic beam by a crystallin powder
This demonstrates how a powder diffraction pattern is produced and you can see the influence of the wavelength of the beam on the resulting pattern.

5- Advanced features
Diffraction can be embedded in a Flash presentation which will drive it through a set of Apple scripts.
Diffraction includes an optional timeout feature that can be activated e.g. if the program is used in a multimedia viewer presentation.