Molecular bond selective x-ray scattering for nanoscale analysis of soft matter

We introduce a new technique using resonant soft x-ray scattering for characterizing heterogeneous chemical structure at nanometer length scales in polymers, biological material, and other soft matter. Resonant enhancements bring new contrast mechanisms and increased sensitivity to bridge a gap between bond-specific contrast in chemical sensitive imaging and the higher spatial resolution of traditional small-angle scattering techniques. We illustrate sensitivity to chemical bonding with the resonant scattering near the carbon K edge from latex spheres of differing chemistry and sizes. By tuning to x-ray absorption resonances associated with particular carbon-carbon or carbon-oxygen bonds we can isolate the scattering from different phases in a 2-phase mixture. We then illustrate this increased scattering contrast with a study of the templating process to form nanometer scale pores in 100 nm thick polymer films