Benefits of Hard X-Radiation

This white paper outlines the main benefits of using hard radiation for material analysis studies. X-ray powder diffractometers are generally equipped with X-ray sources using Cu anodes. For specific applications, however, switching to shorter wavelength, ‘harder’ radiation, like obtained from X-ray tubes with Mo or Ag anodes, gives significant improvements over Cu, or even allows experiments that are impossible with Cu radiation, like experiments where a large Q range needs to be probed.

Often, people make use of synchrotron radiation, but new developments on source, optics and detector technologies allow a variety of hard radiation experiments in the home lab. In this white paper we present six key advantages of hard radiation studies.