Diffuse X-ray scattering from tiny sample volumes

Abstract

The emergence of intense synchrotron X-ray sources, efficient focusing optics and high-performance X-ray sensitive area detectors allows for measurements of diffuse scattering from cubic micron-scale sample volumes. Here we present an experiment that illustrates methods for studying the local structure and defect content of tiny sample volumes. In the experiment, an X-ray microbeam illuminating about {approx}5 {micro}m{sup 3} of a Ni-based superalloy single crystal, is used to collect Laue patterns and reciprocal space volume maps around fundamental and a superstructure reflections. This measurement illustrates how diffuse reciprocal-space distributions can be collected with good spatial and momentum-transfer resolution from a tiny real-space sample volume. This example demonstrates that emerging diffuse scattering techniques can provide fundamentally new information about crystallographic organization and defect content over many length scales.