| Dowman P. Varn Complexity Sciences Center Physics Department University of California at Davis Davis, CA 95616, USA | Geoffrey S. Canright Telenor Research and Development 1331 Fornebu, Norway |
James P. Crutchfield Complexity Sciences Center Physics Department University of California at Davis Davis, CA 95616, USA |
ABSTRACT: In previous publications [Phys. Rev. B 66 174110 (2002), Acta Crystallogr. B 63:2 (2006) 169-182] we introduced and applied a new technique for discovering and describing planar disorder in close-packed structures directly from their diffrac- tion patterns. Here, we provide the theoretical development behind those results, adapting computational mechanics to describe one-dimensional structure in mate- rials. We show that the resulting statistical model of the stacking structure—called the ε-machine—allows the calculation of measures of memory, structural complexity, and configurational entropy. The methods developed here can be adapted to a wide range of experimental systems in which power spectra data are available.