High-Energy Synchrotron X-Ray Diffraction Study of High-Temperature Levitated Liquids

Containerless techniques allow us to study the structure of liquids at high-temperature, because they can avoid two distinct problems: (i) container interactions and contamination, and (ii) the effects of the container walls on the structural measurements. Recently a combination of containerless methods and synchrotron x-ray diffraction technique has been an essential tool to study the structure of liquids at high-temperature or supercooled liquids [1]. However most of diffraction experiments have been carried out using a reflection geometry with low energy x-rays, which makes it difficult to obtain reliable data. High-energy x-rays from synchrotron radiation source provide several advantages; high resolution in real space due to the wide range of scattering vector Q (= (4 sin , 2 : scattering angle, : wavelength of photons), smaller correction terms (especially for absorption correction), reduction of truncation errors. Furthermore a combination of high-energy x-ray diffraction and neutron diffraction is one of the powerful tools to study shortand intermediate-range structure of disordered materials [2-4]. In this study, we tried to carry out diffraction experiment using a combination of conical nozzle levitation and high-energy synchrotron x-rays to obtain reliable diffraction data of amorphous silica at high-temperature.