Structure of disordered materials under ambient to extreme conditions revealed by synchrotron x-ray diffraction techniques at SPring-8—recent instrumentation and synergic collaboration with modelling and topological analyses

Abstract

The structure of disordered materials is still not well understood because of insufficient experimental data. Indeed, diffraction patterns from disordered materials are very broad and can be described only in pairwise correlations because of the absence of translational symmetry. Brilliant hard x-rays from third-generation synchrotron radiation sources enable us to obtain high-quality diffraction data for disordered materials from ambient to high temperature and high pressure, which has significantly improved our grasp of the nature of order in disordered materials. Here, we introduce the progress in the instrumentation for hard x-ray beamlines at SPring-8 over the last 20 years with associated results and advanced data analysis techniques to understand the topology in disordered materials.

Structure of water-in-salt and water-in-bisalt electrolytes

“…The diffraction data were corrected for polarization, absorption, and background, and the contribution of Compton scattering was subtracted using standard analysis procedures. 26 The corrected data sets were normalized to extract the X-ray-weighted normalized F ( Q ), given by eqn (2) and (3) with the neutron scattering lengths replaced by atomic form factors. The atomic numbers of each type of element for the three concentrations are given in Tables S1–S3 (ESI†), respectively.…”

Adaptive Cation Pillar Effects Achieving High Capacity in Li‐Rich Layered Oxide, Li2MnO3‐LiMeO2 (Me = Ni, Co, Mn)

“…X-ray total scattering measurements of the sample powders were performed at the high-energy X-ray diffraction beamline BL04B2 in SPring-8 (Hyogo, Japan). [64,65] The incident X-ray beam with an energy of 61.4 keV was monochromated by the Si 220 reflection of a bent monochromator installed in the beamline. The scattered X-ray photons from the sample powders were counted by four CdTe detectors (X-123CdTe, Amptek) and two highly pure Ge solid-state detectors (GL0515, CANBERRA Industries), which were installed every 8°.…”

Beyond the Average: Spatial and Temporal Fluctuations in Oxide Glass-Forming Systems

“…The corresponding real space information is contained in the reduced PDF G(r), where r is the atomic distance in real space. 54,66 The PDF provides the structural disorder or interatomic distance distribution which can be extracted from the peak width. The PDF g(r), the total correlation function T(r), and the radial distribution function RDF(r) are defined as follows:…”