Anisotropic Compton Scattering in LiF

Both experimental measurement and theoretical calculations of the Compton profiles of LiF indicate a significant anisotropy in the electron momentum distribution whereas published x-ray structure-factor data indicate a lack of anisotropy in the charge density. In this paper we show that momentum distributions can be orders of magnitude more sensitive to anisotropy in the electron distributions than x-ray structure factors, at least in materials where the overlap of the wave functions is small.