An experimental investigation of the truncation errors incurred in single-crystal diffractometry

Integrated intensity measurements depend on the wavelength range of integration. In conventional X- ray measurement procedures this range decreases with increasing diffraction angle, which results in a systematic intensity error for which normally no correction is applied. This paper presents an experimental investigation of this error for standard integration scans. A correction formula is derived and tested, and it is shown that failure to take account of this error has led to spuriously high temperature factors in most X-ray structure analyses.