Chirality-induced 'forbidden' reflections in X-ray resonant scattering

It is shown that additional Bragg reflections can appear exclusively owing to the local chirality associated with the left-right asymmetric environmen t of scattering atoms in non-magnetic crystals. The structure amplitude of these reflections depends on the antisymmetric part of a third-rank tensor describing the spatial dispersion effects. It enhances for resonant near-ed ge scattering through a mixed multipole transition, which includes a dipole -quadrupole contribution. It is shown that this mechanism works even for ce ntrosymmetric crystals, and some realistic examples are considered in detai l (alpha -Fe2O3, LiNbO3 etc.). For instance, the interference between the d ipole-quadrupole and quadrupole-quadrupole terms may be responsible for the threefold symmetry of the azimuthal dependence of the hhh, h = 2n+1, refle ctions observed recently in hematite.