8th Liquid Matter Conference September 6-10, 2011 Wien, Austria ...

P5.22Wed 711:10-14:00Hard x-ray microscopy - insitu study of colloidaldispersionsDmytro Byelov, 1 Janne-Mieke Meijer, 1 Irina Snigireva, 1 Anatoly Snigirev, 2 andAndrei Petukhov 11 Van ’t Hoff Laboratory for Physical and Colloid Chemistry, Utrecht University, Padualaan 8,3584 CH, Utrecht, Netherlands2 ESRF, Grenoble, FranceThe ability of colloids to self-assemble into periodic structures plays an important role in manydevelopments in materials science. Exact information about long-range periodic order and localdefects in these structures are inevitable for further progress in applications. The popular methodsfor the study of colloidal systems such as electron microscopy and confocal optical microscopyrequire special sample preparation for the experiment, which often makes impossible insitustudy of solution based colloidal crystals. On the other hand hard x-ray microscopy (HXRM)method can overcome most of such limitations. The intrinsically low contrast and relatively lowabsorption losses of hard x-rays make them applicable to practically all organic and inorganicmaterials. Due to their short wavelength (around 0.1 nm), a very broad range of scales can beaccessed. X-rays also can be used to study materials that strongly scatter visible light and forthe insitu experiments. A crucial point for HXRM experiments is focusing elements but recentdevelopments in x-ray refractive optics [1] provide beneficial solutions. A great advantage of theuse of refractive optics is the possibility to retrieve a diffraction pattern and a real space image ofthe sample in the same experimental setup [2]. We demonstrate the method on selected examples:colloidal crystals formed by sedimented hematite cubes; smectic ordering in suspensions ofgoethite nanorods [3]; smectic ordering in suspensions of colloidal silica rods.[1] Snigirev, A. ; Kohn, V. ; Snigireva, I. ; Lengeler, B. Nature, 1996, 384, pp. 49-51.[2] Bosak, A. ; Snigireva, I. ; Napolskii, K. S. ; Snigirev, A. Adv. Mat. 2010, v22, 30, 3256.[3] van den Pol, E. ; Petukhov, A. V. ; Thies-Weesie, D. M. E. ; Byelov D. ; Vroege G. J. Phys.Rev. Lett. , 2009, 103, 258301.22