On the number of independent reflections in a powder diffraction pattern

Peak overlap in powder diffraction patterns necessarily implies that the nu mber of visible peaks is less than the number of Bragg peaks. While the num ber of Bragg reflections is easily enumerated, the number of statistically independent Bragg peaks is not. In this paper, it is shown that, although t here is no single or simple answer to this problem, Bragg peak intensity co rrelation is a well behaved statistical quantity that can be used to expres s a measure of the number of independent peaks.