Abstract Contrast variation small-angle neutron scattering (CV-SANS) has been widely employed for conducting nano structural analyses of multicomponent systems. In CV-SANS experiments, the scattering intensities of samples with different scattering contrasts are decomposed into partial scattering functions that correspond to the structure of each component and the cross-correlations between different components via singular value decomposition (SVD). However, the estimation of partial scattering functions with small absolute values often suffers from instability due to the significant differences among the singular values. In this paper, we propose a remedy for this instability by introducing Tikhonov regularization, which ensures a more stable reconstruction of the partial scattering functions.
Machida et al. (Fri,) studied this question.