Extra:Intersecting planes

A common problem in scattering is to consider the intersection of various planes (representing the Ewald sphere, reciprocal space, etc.).

Angle between two planes

The general case for the angle between two planes is well known. Consider a particular case where we want to know how the angle between two planes depends on the direction/orientation of a third plane/vector that intersects the first two. I.e. what is the minimal angle between two planes along a 'certain direction' (what is the angle between two vectors that both lie on the third plane, and which lie on planes 1 and 2, respectively).

One of the planes represents reciprocal-space scattering (e.g. mostly localized to a plane); the other represents the detector. We are interested in the angle between them so that we can calculate the distance between them, so that we can compute 'how much' scattering is seen on the detector. To make this concrete, plane 1 lies in the $\scriptstyle xy$ plane, and thus has normal vector:

$\mathbf {n} _{1}={\begin{bmatrix}0&0&1\end{bmatrix}}$

The first plane intersects the origin. The second plane also intersects the origin, but is tilted about the $\scriptstyle x$-axis by $\scriptstyle \alpha$, such that its normal is:

$\mathbf {n} _{2}={\begin{bmatrix}0&-\sin \alpha \ &\cos \alpha \end{bmatrix}}$

We are interested in quantities that are a particular distance ($\scriptstyle q$) from the origin. Imagine a vector of length $\scriptstyle q$ lying in plane 1, rotated about the $\scriptstyle z$ axis by $\scriptstyle \phi$ (i.e. the angular distance from the $\scriptstyle y$-axis is $\scriptstyle \phi$:

$\mathbf {v} _{1}={\begin{bmatrix}q\sin \phi &q\cos \phi \ &0\end{bmatrix}}$

The second vector (lying in plane 2)

$\scriptstyle x$