A NEW HIGH-THROUGHPUT DIFFRACTOMETER FOR SOLID-STATE CHEMISTRY

固体x射线辐射的散射是表征新材料的主要手段。由此产生的衍射图案既提供了识别物质的指纹，又包含了固体中原子排列方式的详细信息。仪器仪表的最新进展导致了分辨率的提高，允许探测细微的结构变化，同时显着降低数据采集速率，通常以分钟为单位。我们建议利用这些发展来对复杂系统进行详细的结构研究，调查大量的小样本，由平行合成程序产生，并收集多个数据集来跟踪随着温度升高的结构变化。收集这类数据的能力对于我们建立新的研究计划的努力至关重要，这些计划将生产一系列技术上重要的材料，并导致开发材料发现的平行方法，其中可以同时进行大量反应。这些计划将导致用于信息存储系统的新材料，用于生产能够利用废热的发电机的材料，用于建造无运动部件的无氟氯化碳冷却装置的材料，或结合多种功能的材料，例如光学透明度或具有半导体性的分子尺度孔隙。

The scattering of X-ray radiation from solids provides the principal means of characterising new materials. The diffraction pattern that results, provides both a fingerprint that identifies a substance and contains detailed information on the way that the atoms within the solid are arranged. Recent advances in instrumentation have led to improvements in resolution, allowing subtle structural variations to be probed, whilst significantly reducing the rate of data acquisition, often to the order of minutes. We propose to exploit such developments to carry out detailed structural studies on complex systems, to investigate large numbers of small samples, arising from parallel synthesis programmes and to collect multiple data sets to follow structural changes with increasing temperature. The capacity to collect such data is critical to our efforts to establish new research programmes that will produce a range of technologically important materials and lead to the development of parallel approaches to materials discovery, in which large number of reactions can be carried out simultaneously. These programmes will lead to new materials for use in information storage systems, materials for production of power generators capable of using waste heat, materials for construction of CFC-free cooling devices with no moving parts, or materials that combine multiple functions, such as optical transparency or porosity at the molecular scale with semiconductivity .