Principal component analysis of diffuse magnetic neutron scattering: a theoretical study.

We present a theoretical study of the potential of principal component (PC) analysis to analyse magnetic diffuse neutron scattering data on quantum materials. To address this question, we simulate the scattering functionSqfor a model describing a cluster magnet with anisotropic spin-spin interactions under different conditions of applied field and temperature. We find high dimensionality reduction and that the algorithm can be trained with surprisingly small numbers of simulated observations.