Surface and Interface Analysis using X-ray Scattering: Core Capabilities Overview

Grazing Incidence Small Angle X-ray Scattering (GISAXS) and Grazing Incidence X-ray Diffraction (GIXD) are powerful non-destructive tools to obtain statistical structural information on the micro and nanoscale from the surface, buried interface, sub-monolayer, monolayer and multilayers in inorganic and organic materials. GISAXS typically provides information about the density correlation and shape of the objects at the surface or buried interface. While GIXD is sensitive to material’s crystallinity, crystal orientation and phases present. These methods can be efficiently used to correlate structure and properties for various types of materials such as polymers, ceramics, metals, semiconductors, liquid crystals. An important advantage of these techniques is that there is no or minimal sample preparation required therefore not only materials but also working devices (e.g. solar cells, transistors, batteries) can be analysed using a combination of GISAXS and GIXD.