AMORPH: A statistical program for characterizing amorphous materials by X-ray diffraction

Abstract AMORPH utilizes a new Bayesian statistical approach to interpreting X-ray diffraction results of samples with both crystalline and amorphous components. AMORPH fits X-ray diffraction patterns with a mixture of narrow and wide components, simultaneously inferring all of the model parameters and quantifying their uncertainties. The program simulates background patterns previously applied manually, providing reproducible results, and significantly reducing inter- and intra-user biases. This approach allows for the quantification of amorphous and crystalline materials and for the characterization of the amorphous component, including properties such as the centre of mass, width, skewness, and nongaussianity of the amorphous component. Results demonstrate the applicability of this program for calculating amorphous contents of volcanic materials and independently modeling their properties in compositionally variable materials.