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short communications
A method for least-squares estimation of the intensities of overlapping diffraction peaks has been successfully applied in structure refinement with powder data. The diffraction peaks are taken to have arbitrary but similar shape, a single set of experimentally determined Fourier coefficients representing this `universal profile' is used, and the abscissa is transformed to take account of angular dependence of the actual profiles. The method has been implemented with a Fortran IV program which also separates α1 and α2 contributions and yields the correlation matrix for the parameters representing the overlapping peaks.