The same brilliant beam can be used in many different ways. Across the world’s light sources, a wide array of samples — from protein crystals to aircraft components — is studied with techniques that fall broadly into three families: diffraction and scattering, spectroscopy, and imaging.
Seeing structureDiffraction and scattering
X-ray diffraction is one of the oldest and most powerful synchrotron techniques. When X-rays pass through a crystal, they reflect off the regular planes of atoms and form a pattern on a detector; from that pattern, researchers work backwards to the atomic structure that produced it. It is the method behind solving the structures of minerals, ceramics, electronic and magnetic materials, and the proteins of structural biology.
Scattering, by contrast, reveals the structure and dynamics of larger, less ordered assemblies — the kind found in living organisms and in complex materials such as polymers and colloids.
- X-ray diffraction / crystallography
- Resolves the three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in crystalline solids and macromolecules — the workhorse of structural biology and materials science.
- Small- and wide-angle scattering (SAXS / WAXS)
- Probes shape, size and packing in disordered or partially ordered systems such as proteins in solution, polymers and colloids.
- X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS)
- Uses element-specific absorption edges to reveal which elements are present and their local chemical environment and oxidation state.
- Photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS / ARPES)
- Measures electrons ejected by X-rays to map surface chemistry and the electronic structure of materials.
- Imaging and tomography
- Builds two- and three-dimensional pictures of an object’s interior, non-destructively, from the visible surface down to the nanoscale.
- Infrared microspectroscopy
- Excites the vibrational modes of molecules to identify chemical composition point by point across a sample, including biomedical tissue.
Reading chemistrySpectroscopy
Spectroscopy reveals the elemental composition, chemical state and physical properties of both inorganic materials and biological systems. By sweeping through a range of photon energies, researchers measure how a sample absorbs, reflects or re-emits light. In the X-ray region, every element absorbs sharply at characteristic wavelengths — its absorption edges — so the technique can fingerprint exactly which elements are present and how they are bonded. In the infrared range, characteristic vibrations of molecules are excited and read out, often through a microscope to build a chemical map of the sample.
Looking insideImaging and microscopy
Imaging records pictures of the object under study, dramatically sharpened by the brightness of synchrotron light. Absorption-contrast imaging works much like a hospital X-ray — denser regions block more X-rays and cast a shadow — but a synchrotron beam can be billions of times brighter, yielding far finer detail. Microscopy adds the tuneability of the beam, so that each element responds at its own absorption frequency and the resulting image carries chemical as well as structural information at the nanometre scale.
Tomography extends these methods into three dimensions, assembling a series of views taken at different angles into a full interior reconstruction — the same principle as a medical CT scan. Because it is non-destructive, it can expose hidden stresses and cracks inside engineered parts such as turbine blades, or detail the internal structure of biological tissue, without ever cutting the sample open.