Calibration of X-ray diffraction data by Genetic Algorithm technique

Calibration of an area detector is a crucial step of bidimensional X-ray diffraction (XRD) readout data pre-processing. The parameters phase space corresponding to the experimental setup (tilt and rotation angles, beam center) is spanned by means of a genetic algorithm. The cost function implemented therein corresponds to the self-correlation of the azimuthal 1D profiles obtained by unfolding the original 2D image around a guess center. The method is robust and reliable, due to the correlations asymmetry smearing off. It has been succesfully applied to synthetic images as well as to real XRD bidimensional images.