Scientific Review: Small Angle Neutron Scattering Spectrometer (SMARTer) for Nanostructure Studies of Soft Condensed Matter

Abstract

Abstract Small angle neutron scattering (SANS) is an important technique in order to study both the structural and dynamical properties of a wide range of substances in soft condensed matter [Citation1]. Soft condensed matter includes a large class of molecular masterials, i.e., polymers, liquid crystals, micellar solutions, microemulsions, and colloidal suspensions, as well as biological materials, e.g., membranes, vesicles, proteins, enzymes, etc. These substances are interesting both for basic research and commercially as functional materials. Since the complexity of the structures of soft condensed matter systems for some applications will increase in the future, it is posing challenging problems to basic science. Herewith, the SANS technique, which is one of the advanced tools to investigate the static and dynamic structures of soft condensed matter systems, will be described intensively for a wide variety of experiments, including in-situ measurements. Acknowledgements The authors are indebted to Dr. J. Suzuki (JAERI/JAEA, Japan) for providing the data reduction program for small angle scattering, to Prof. H. Hasegawa (University of Kyoto, Japan) for supplying the polymers standard samples, to Dr. P. S. Goyal (UGC-DEA, BARC, India) for intensive discussions in developing and improving the instrument, to Dr. V. K. Aswal (BARC, India) for supporting some SDS, CTAB, and Pluronics sample data measured at BARC and PSI, to Dr. Knott (ANSTO, Australia) for providing the AgBE standard sample (as it is very useful to calibrate the instrument) and for intensive discussions, and to Dr. J. Kohlbrecher (PSI, Switzerland) for advice in running the instrument at very low Q.