NANOSTAR – Analyzes pure sample properties

The materials scientists and engineers of today are able to understand and influence the properties of materials on a nanoscale level. Exciting new materials such as designer polymers and bioceramics are being made, and continuing advances with materials such as liquid crystals, metal-organic and thin film coatings are made possible by investigating and altering their nanostructures.

SAXS/GISAXS – Information on the nanoscale

SAXS (Small-Angle X-ray Scattering) is a reliable, economic and non-destructive method for analyzing nanostructured materials, yielding information on particle sizes and size distributions from 1 to 100 nm, shape and orientation distributions in liquid, powders and bulk samples.

A recent field of interest for SAXS application is the study of biological macromolecules (Bio-SAXS) since the scattering profile contains information about their size, shape and internal structure. This allows for the calculation of relevant structural parameters such as the molecular volume, the molecular mass or the radius of gyration.

Nanostructured thin film samples, such as quantum dot arrays, self-organized thin films, biological molecules on surfaces, … are measured in grazing-incidence mode. Thanks to the implementation of the latest developments in X-ray source and detector techology, also GISAXS (Grazing Incidence Small Angle X-ray Scattering) measurements are now very well possible with the NANOSTAR.

NANOSTAR – Synchrotron SAXS beamline design

Brilliant X-ray sources are combined with innovative multi-layer optics, which provides an intense, point-like incident beam upon the sample. Thanks to the 3-pinhole collimation, the background is extremely low, which is a must for the analysis of weakly scattering samples. The VÅNTEC-2000 is a large 2-D detector with true photon counting ability, featuring a maximum performance in angular resolution, low background and dynamic range. Such a large 2-dimensional detector is essential for SAXS/GISAXS measurements as it avoids any potential misinterpretation of data, eliminating the need for restrictive initial assumptions about the sample. In fact, the NANOSTAR analyzes pure sample properties, even for non-isotropic sample systems. Additionally, a real space image with µm SAXS resolution of the sample can be taken by performing Nanography.