The major application of n-beam diffraction is that it provides phase information on the structure factors, which can be used in structure determination and, out of the more than 300 publications devoted to that topic, nearly half concern the phase problem.
A different interesting property of n-beam diffraction is the enhancement of the Borrmann effect under special circumstances, the so-called super Borrmann effect.
N-beam diffraction has also proved to be an attractive technique to study the influence of an electric field on crystals, through different effects. On the other hand, when an electric field is applied to a crystal such as gallium arsenide where each atom is coordinated to four atoms of the other kind by polar-covalent bonds there are modifications of the amplitude and phase of the structure factor. N-beam diffraction is an ideal tool to measure the variations of the phase in terms of the applied electric field. On the other hand, the applied field induces strains which are related to changes in the lattice parameters that can be revealed by changes in the positions of the peaks excited by Umweganregung during Renningerscan. This was observed by Avanci et al. (1998, 2000) who used the results to measure the piezoelectric constants of several organic non linear optical materials.
