Many useful properties of materials manifest from the precise structure of a given composition. Traditional structure determination techniques such as X-ray diffraction (XRD) is suitable for atoms of moderate-to-high atomic number; however, it can lead to ambiguous structure assignments for materials containing atoms with low atomic number. In addition, XRD relies heavily on long-range order for correct measurement, but such long-range order is often lacking in many classes of materials, e.g. nanostructures, amorphous materials and materials with a tetrahedral network, making structural characterization of such materials via XRD difficult. Such as a class of materials are exemplified by silicates which consist of a tetrahedral structure of silicons and oxygens (which have low atomic number and are difficult to observe via XRD).