Abstract
It appears that future confusion could be avoided, and a considerable amount of space saved, if there were some short way of showing that a particular measurement was referred to the Siegbahn scale, and not intended to be absolute. Adoption of the suggestion of Lipson and Riley1, that inaccurate measurements should be given in ÅngstrØms and accurate ones in X-units, seems undesirable for two reasons. First, it might give the impression that the absolute accuracy of X-ray measurements is of the order of 0.1 per cent, not 0.001 per cent. Secondly, it is tacitly agreed among crystallographers that a unit about the size of the ÅngstrØm is much handier than the X-unit. May I suggest that measurements based on the Siegbahn scale be denoted by 'kX.'? The symbol is short, and expresses fairly obviously that the measurement is in thousands of X-units. Thus the lattice parameter of iron (to use Lipson and Riley's example) would be expressed as 2.86 kX. or 2.8604 kX., the increase in accuracy not requiring a change in the unit.
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Lipson and Riley, NATURE, 151, 502 (1943).
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WILSON, A. X-ray Wave-lengths : Notation. Nature 151, 562 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151562a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151562a0
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