Compton profiles of LiF

$\gamma$-ray Compton profiles of LiF with the scattering vector along the , , and axes are reported. Both the absolute profiles and their anisotropy are derived from a tight-binding model and compared with experiments. The overall agreement between theory and experiment is found to be satisfactory for all three directions. Recent calculations of Euwema et al. are compared with the present work and found to predict incorrect anisotropies, particularly at small momentum transfers. It is also shown that momentum distributions can be orders of magnitude more sensitive to anisotropy in the electron distributions than x-ray structure factors, at least in materials where overlap of the wave functions is small.