Identification and structural characterization of mineralogical and cultural heritage related phases by synchrotron through-the-substrate microdiffraction technique

Anna Crespi, Lluís Casas, Oriol Vallcorba, Lara Maritan, Roberta Di Febo, Jordi Rius

X-ray diffraction is a basic tool in the field of mineralogy, cultural heritage and material science that allows both the identification of crystalline phases and their structural determination. However, the characterization by X-ray diffraction is difficult when the phases of interest are not homogeneous, are small sized or are only present in very small regions of the sample. For this reason, a variant of the transmission microdiffraction technique called ‘synchrotron through-the-substrate microdiffraction’ (tts-μXRD) has been developed. This technique collect synchrotron diffraction data from a thin section of the sample mounted on a glass slide (Rius, 2011). The small beam diameter used in the experiment allows the acquisition of data from single phases (or from a reduced number of phases) directly on the thin section, thus preserving the textural information and avoiding the sample manipulation.

Keywords: Polished thin sections, Synchrotron tts-μXRD, X-ray data

Proscience vol. 6

Pp 7-11

doi: 10.14644/mms.2018.002