Resonant soft x-ray scattering from structured polymer nanoparticles

The application of resonant soft x-ray scattering to chemically heterogeneous soft condensed matter materials is presented. Two structured styrene-acrylic polymer composite latex particles ~230 nm in diameter were utilized to delineate the potential utility of this technique. Angular scans at photon energies corresponding to strong scattering contrast between specific chemical moieties made it possible to infer the effective radii that correspond to the two polymer phases in the nanoparticles. The results show that resonant soft x-ray scattering should be a powerful complementary tool to neutron and hard x-ray scattering for the characterization of structured soft condensed matter nanomaterials