Nanostructured materials are usually not periodically long-range ordered, and are therefore not accessible by conventional methods used on crystalline materials. In fact, many materials of technological importance and their properties are characterized by varying degrees of disorder, and generate diffraction patterns with a pronounced diffuse component and few Bragg peaks. For completely disordered materials such as glasses and liquids a statistical description of the structure is often adopted. Many materials however lack perfect long range order, but have well defined structures on nanometer length-scales. Here the approach of the pair distribution function (PDF), which has its origins in the study of glasses and liquids, can be used to determine their structure from the total scattering including diffuse as well as Bragg scattering.

Small-Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) is a well-established and widely used nondestructive technique for the quantitative structural and morphological characterization of non-crystalline or partly ordered materials. The dimensions of the objects which can be investigated range approximately from 1 to some hundreds of nm. SAXS can be applied to a huge variety of systems, such as semiconductors, metal alloys, natural and synthetic polymers, colloids, micelles, micro-emulsions, porous media, liquid crystals, macromolecules in solution or in the solid state, and complex multiphase particulate systems, either isotropically dispersed, or spatially oriented.

Grazing-incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) measurements are sensitive to both the surface morphology and the internal structure of films, and provide information both about lateral and normal ordering at a surface or inside a thin film. Possible applications include thin polymer films, nanoparticles at interfaces or on surfaces, and semiconductor nanostructures. As a result, GISAXS provides an excellent complement to more conventional nanoscale structural probes such as atomic force microscopy and transmission electron microscopy.

The full potential of these techniques is realized when using a modern third generation synchrotron source (high photon flux, strong beam collimation and choice of wavelength in order to avoid fluorescence or to perform anomalous measurements) and when patterns are recorded with low-noise, fast two-dimensional detectors. Microbeam applications as well as in-situ and real-time studies of e.g. nanoparticle formation and growth in the (sub)millisecond range are possible.

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1. Nanostructured materials as seen by Small Angle Scattering
2. GISAXS study of hydrogen implanted silicon