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ExPaNDS-eu / ExPaNDS-experimental-techniques-ontology

EU Photon and Neutron Ontologies (task 3.2)
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Coherent vs. incoherent scattering #81

Open gerrit-guenther opened 1 year ago

gerrit-guenther commented 1 year ago

Is there a particular reason for having 'incoherent scattering' in scattering technique? If not, I would remove it because:

  1. I would expect an 'incoherent process' to be a sibling class of 'diffraction' (as a typical coherent process) but not to be a sibling of 'elastic process' (since an incoherent process can be elastic or inelastic).
  2. The sub-classes (such as inelastic neutron spectroscopy) measure usually coherent and incoherent processes without distinction.

Maybe make 'inelastic scattering' a sibling of 'elastic scattering'?

spc93 commented 1 year ago

Not really sure. I think it is best to look at the superclasses of each term and see if any are wrong (very bad) or less specific than they could be (slightly bad). Inelastic scattering comes under incoherent scattering because inelastic scattering is always incoherent. (In fact, this is not strictly true as one could think of coherent scattering from a moving crystal, but we possibly need to be a bit pragmatic).