Dear Tejaswini M L
See the answers to a similar question.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_can_I_measure_crystallinity_by_XRD_Did_you_use_any_software
Dear Tejaswani,
To check the nature of the materials using XRD patterns, you have to look the nature of Bragg's peaks appearing in the XRD pattern. If you get a very broad humped peak, then the material will be amorphous with short range ordering. If you get sharp peaks ii the XRD pattern, then the material is crystalline. If you get combination of both, then the material exhibits both character i.e. semicrystalline nature. I hope it will be helpful for you.
If there are 1 or 2 very broad peaks (or humps) then it is amorphous. and
if there are no. of sharp peaks then the material is crystalline.
With very thin films you have to be careful. Firstly, you need to employ gracing incident XRD (GIXRD). Secondly, if you get an amorphous signature in your XRD pattern (broad peaks as described by Akeshwar) that doesn't prove that your film is amorphous. It might be that you are not getting enough signal from your actual thin film and instead the amorphous signal comes from your underlying substrate.
In that case, I'd recommend doing TEM analysis (either deposit thin film on TEM grids or prepare a cross-sectional TEM sample).
Dear Tejaswini,
In amorphous materials, sharp diffraction peaks are missing as no long range order is present in them. A broad halo is, however, observed in such cases. On the other hand, in crystalline materials, sharp diffraction peaks are observed due to presence of long range order. In partially crystalline amorphous materials, peaks may not be very sharp. From the relative peak heights, percentage of crystallinity can be estimated in partially crystalline amorphous materials.
Dr. A. Kumar
Amorphous material shows noisy peaks, but crystalline one shows clear peaks that relate to material itself.
In XRD graph (Intensity vs 2 theta) is used to find the nature of the material. For sharp peak the material may be taken as crystalline. For broader peak it may be poly crystalline, while in case where there is no peak, but some noisy pattern, then the materials is said to have amorphous nature. I agree with the comments/answer given by Dr.A.Kumar.
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