Angular x-ray cross-correlation analysis (AXCCA): Basic concepts and recent applications to soft matter and nanomaterials

• Main Authors: Zaluzhnyy, Ivan A, Kurta, Ruslan P, Scheele, Marcus, Schreiber, Frank, Ostrovskii, Boris I, Vartanyants, Ivan A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 22-09-2019
• Subjects: Physics - Soft Condensed Matter
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1909.09973

Materials, 12(21), 3464 (2019) Angular x-ray cross-correlation analysis (AXCCA) is a technique which allows
quantitative measurement of the angular anisotropy of x-ray diffraction
patterns and provides insights into the orientational order in the system under
investigation. This method is based on the evaluation of the angular
cross-correlation function of the scattered intensity distribution on a
two-dimensional (2D) detector and further averaging over many diffraction
patterns for enhancement of the anisotropic signal. Over the last decade, AXCCA
was successfully used to study the anisotropy in various soft matter systems,
such as solutions of anisometric particles, liquid crystals, colloidal
crystals, superlattices composed by nanoparticles, etc. This review provides an
introduction to the technique and gives a survey of the recent experimental
work in which AXCCA in combination with micro- or nanofocused x-ray microscopy
was used to study the orientational order in various soft matter systems.