NEXAFS microscopy and soft x-ray resonant scattering are soft x-ray techniques that offer high intrinsic contrast to image materials in real space or characterize structure in reciprocal space, respectively. Furthermore, the high contrast is strongly photon energy dependent and correlated to the chemical moieties present in the sample, thus allowing compositionally sensitive characterization. The carbon, nitrogen and oxygen NEXAFS is particularly sensitive to differences in composition in organic matter, and NEXAFS microscopy with presently ~30 nm spatial resolution and resonant scattering with a q-range of ~2 nm^-1 are thus excellent tools to characterize organic soft condensed matter and organic/inorganic hybrid materials. I will present the present state of the art of these characterization tools with a focus on the most recent developments in resonant scattering and resonant reflectivity. These results show that resonant soft x-ray scattering will be a powerful alternative tool to neutron- and conventional x-ray scattering for the characterization of structured soft condensed matter nanomaterials. The advantages of these soft x-ray resonant methods are primarily their high, tunable contrast compared to conventional x-ray scattering and the lack of special sample preparation requirements, i.e. isotope substitution (deuteration), which is typically required to enhance contrast for neutrons.

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