To fully understand the interaction of an incident beam of nuclei with a crystalline structure, it is necessary to comprehend two more key concepts: blocking and channeling.
When a beam of ions with parallel trajectories is incident on a target atom, scattering off that atom will prevent collisions in a cone-shaped region "behind" the target relative to the beam.  This occurs because the repulsive potential of the target atom bends close ion trajectories away from their original path, and is referred to as blocking. The radius of this blocked region, at a distance L from the original atom, is given by
When an ion is scattered from deep inside a sample, it can then re-scatter off a second atom, creating a second blocked cone in the direction of the scattered trajectory.  This can be detected by carefully varying the detection angle relative to the incident angle.
Channeling is observed when the incident beam is aligned with a major symmetry axis of the crystal. Incident nuclei which avoid collisions with surface atoms are excluded from collisions with all atoms deeper in the sample, due to blocking by the first layer of atoms. When the interatomic distance is large compared to the radius of the blocked cone, the incident ions can penetrate many times the interatomic distance without being backscattered.  This can result in a drastic reduction of the observed backscattered signal when the incident beam is oriented along one of the symmetry directions, allowing determination of a sample's regular crystal structure. Channeling works best for very small blocking radii, i.e. for high-energy, low-atomic-number incident ions such as He.
The tolerance for the deviation of the ion beam angle of incidence relative to the symmetry direction depends on the blocking radius, making the allowable deviation angle proportional to
While the intensity of an RBS peak is observed to decrease across most of its width when the beam is channeled, a narrow peak at the high-energy end of larger peak will often be observed, representing surface scattering from the first layer of atoms.  The presence of this peak opens the possibility of surface sensitivity for RBS measurements.