Resonant Soft X-ray Scattering of Polymers with a 2D Detector: Initial Results and System Developments at the Advanced Light Source

Soft x-ray scattering facility at the Advanced Light Source with real-time data processing and analysis

“…The reader is referred to the literature for more details. 14,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22] More recently, it has been pointed out and shown that R-SoXS furthermore has unique contrast to bond orientation if polarization control of the incident photons is possible. 23,24 Although soft x-ray scattering systems and facilities with detection systems based on 2D detectors such as CCDs have been previously developed, these are mostly optimized for magnetic scattering 25 and/or coherent imaging.…”

“…This facility 29 was optimized for reflectivity and thus provides only slow R-SoXS data acquisition rates for any geometry other than θ -2θ scans, which can lead to radiation damage. 20 In order to greatly improve data rates and experimental capabilities to study radiation sensitive soft matter, we developed a new endstation at the ALS Beamline 11.0.1.2 capable of scattering x rays with energies from 165 eV to 1.8 keV to probe size scales from 0.5 nm to 5 μm. We describe the hardware components of the beamline and endstation.…”

“…Unfortunately, the affected energy range is often quite useful in probing organic systems. [15][16][17]20 Since the reflectivity of the higher order x rays is virtually unaffected by carbon contamination, the reflected beam is enriched in photons of the wrong energy. This increased fraction of higher harmonics makes normalization to incident flux and quantitative analysis of experiments exploiting the unique contrasts available in this energy range difficult if not impossible.…”

Imaging Nanoscale Morphology of Semiconducting Polymer Films with Photoemission Electron Microscopy

“…A comprehensive overview is given by Huang et al [6] as well as McNeill. Therefore, AFM investigations are often combined with scattering techniques such as grazing-incidence X-ray scattering (GIXS), [12][13][14][15][16] resonant soft-X-ray scattering (R-SoXS), [12,13,17] or small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), [18] or with polarization-dependent absorption techniques such as near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS). A major drawback of this technique is that it does not deliver information about the orientation of polymer chains inside crystallites and the local degree of order.…”

Interfaces in organic devices studied with resonant soft x-ray reflectivity

“…27,28 As an alternative, resonant soft x-ray reflectivity (R-SoXR) is a promising tool to characterize interfacial properties of organic thin films, due to high intrinsic material contrast that exists for most of the organic materials at soft x-ray energies. [29][30][31][32][33] Here, we present the use of R-SoXR to characterize the interfaces between active materials in all three categories of organic devices, i.e., polymer LEDs (PLED), polymer solar cells (PSCs), and polymer TFTs (PTFTs).…”