Corrections in thermal-neutron scattering experiments on molecular systems

The traditional procedures employed to correct an observed scattering spectrum in order to isolate the structure factor, involve approximations that are not valid in many real cases. We present here Monte Carlo simulations based on a Synthetic Model to describe the (incoherent) neutron—molecule interaction, which allow a simultaneous description of multiple, inelastic and beam-attenuation processes into the sample, as well as the contributions due to the presence of a container. The procedure is applied to experiments performed on H 2O and D 2O at a reactor two-axes instrument. We show that our unified scheme produces very good agreement with the measurements and discuss some of its merits as compared with the traditional method.