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How much can affect (in terms of hump) my X-ray diffraction pattern the "amorphous" glass or maybe someone can suggest me other material to compensate for the small amount of the sample. Note: my sample is a powder.

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X-ray diffraction is not a technique I have any experience with, so I'm a little unclear here. Are you saying that the sample you have is roughly a factor of 100 smaller than the ideal sample and are asking what you can try to do to still get a viable result? Do you know what sets the desired size? – dmckee♦ Feb 12 at 19:58

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In the days when I did this sort of thing I used to use silica powder. Yes, you do get a smoothly curved background, but this is easy to seperate from the sharp diffraction lines. I could even get lines from materials adsorbed onto silica powder where the ratio of sample to silica was well below 1:100.

I'm assuming your sample is crystalline - if your sample is amorphous as well I'm afraid you have a problem.

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Yes, my sample is crystalline. If I use silica powder, which in theory is amorphous but practically there is a little bit crystalline, I can obtain a poor but enough to identify the crystalline phase? Generally I know a little bit about the sample, but I want this type of analysis because it is a complementary to others (Raman, Infrared, etc.) and more "specific". Thanks for your suggestion. – Apopei Andrei Ionut Feb 14 at 21:50
Unless you are using a very unusual source of silica you will get no crystalline peaks from the silica. – John Rennie Feb 15 at 6:58

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