Graduate student Devin Grabner’s work on characterizing and optimizing microfluidic flow cell geometry for in situ resonant soft X-ray characterization of molecular nanostructures has been published in the RSC Journal: Lab on a Chip. This work directly characterizes the deformation of silicon nitride (SiN) membranes used as windows under experimental conditions for various cell configurations. The resulting measured deformation was then used to develop a predictive model that combines transmission effects of SiN bowing, incident X-ray beam profiles, and material-dependent resonant scattering cross sections to simulate the effective scattering intensity at the detector across the carbon K-edge. The results overturn the assumption that corner regions dominate the scattering signal, offering explicit design guidelines for maximizing LP-RSoXS signals and significantly advancing the quantitative application of this technique to the characterization of molecular and hybrid nanostructured materials in liquids.
Read the article: Optimizing microfluidic flow cell geometry for in situ resonant soft X-ray characterization of molecular nanostructures | Lab on a Chip (pubs.rsc.org)