Patterns of electron intensity which are (1) formed by electron diffraction, (2) appear as a geometrical feature in a Kikuchi pattern as a pair of lines limiting Kikuchi bands.

Kikuchi lines can can be attributed to a specific set of lattice planes.Kikuchi lines are in fact no lines but Kossel-cone cuts. More precisely they are intersections of two opposite (Kossel) cones with the detector plane. Usually the opening angle of the cones is nearly 90 deg, therefore only at low (SEM) voltages the hyperbolic character becomes recognizable, hence the term Kikuchi lines.Due to the anisotropy of the source point, Kikuchi lines typically appear as a pair of excess and defect lines.We note that the current definition is made for plane detectors and might need to be adjusted should non-planar detectors be used.