New approach to the indexing of powder diffraction patterns using topographs

A new indexing algorithm is proposed that searches solutions thoroughly and quickly. The algorithm is well established for poor quality data e.g. for data containing some false peaks, or for those cases that peak positions coincide with two or more different lattices. It has succeeded for any lattice symmetry by carrying out the thorough search in several minutes at most. A graph structure called topograph, first introduced by the mathematician Conway, plays an important role in our method. In this paper, we introduce the algorithm and give some preliminary results.