Almost all recent developments in nature and materials sciences are based on the investigation and understanding of nanoscaled properties of matter. Many methods have been developed to characterize samples on the nanoscale and have been optimized over the last years. The most outstanding advancements over many orders of magnitude have been achieved in photon-based methods for scattering, diffraction, and spectroscopy, particularly with the use of X-ray radiation. The parameter to describe the quality of an X-ray source is the brilliance. It determines the resolving power of X-ray scattering and diffraction experiments and is a measure of the number of photons traveling through a particular area with a well-defined divergence of the beam and fixed photon-energy spread. In the modern third-generation X-ray sources, synchrotron radiation sources, or X-ray lasers, the brilliance is extraordinarily high compared with earlier X-ray sources, so that the quality of X-ray data is exceptional. This fact has been recognized worldwide, and consequently, many large-scale X-ray sources are under construction or have recently become operational. In the future, synchrotron-based X-ray experiments will become more readily available for scientists to carry out research at the nanoscale.
This book presents the new developments in X-ray diffraction and scattering methods. High-resolution X-ray diffraction and scattering is a key tool for structure analysis not only in bulk materials but also at surfaces and buried interfaces from the sub-nanometre to micrometre range. Bulk and interface investigations of solid and liquid matter are discussed and illustrated with current research examples. The important characteristics of the sources, the experimental set-up and new detector developments are presented, and future exploitation of X-ray free-electron lasers for diffraction applications are considered.
About the Editors:
Bridget Murphy completed her master's at Dublin City University, Ireland, and moved to Daresbury Synchrotron Radiation Source, UK, where as a beamline scientist she specialized in X-ray scattering. She moved to the University of Kiel, Germany, to research phase transitions in layered materials, obtaining her PhD in 2004. She continued developing instrumentation for X-ray investigations of solid and liquid interfaces. Today she is a faculty member at Kiel.
Oliver Seeck graduated at the University of Kiel, Germany, where he studied the structure of thin layers and surfaces. He continued this research as a postdoc at the Advanced Photon Source, Chicago. Thereafter, he worked as scientist at Forschungszentrum Jülich, managing a diffraction beamline at DESY in Hamburg and becoming a faculty member there in 2005. He is now responsible for the diffraction beamline P08 at the third-generation synchrotron radiation source PETRA III.
