View source for Small angle neutron scattering, SANS

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'''Co-authors: Jakob Kirkensgaard and Lise Arleth, University of Copenhagen, Niels Bohr Institute'''

<figure id="fig:Ursula1">[[File:sans_diffract.jpg|thumb|400px|<caption>Illustration of small-angle scattering signal and diffraction peaks in the same data.</caption>]]</figure>
Elastic neutron scattering, or ''neutron diffraction'', was first used to reveal the crystal structure of materials, as will be presented in the page on [[Diffraction from crystals]]<!--in chapter~\ref{ch:powder}-->. First, however, we consider the conceptually simpler - but historically later developed - field of (elastic) small angle neutron scattering (SANS), which provides information on the size and shape of particles on length scales from ~1 nm to ~1000 nm.

As we shall see later, scattering at small angles - or small values of the scattering vector, \(q\) - is a signature of larger objects, while scattering at larger \(q\)-values probes the atomic distance. This is illustrated in <xr id="fig:Ursula1">Figure %i</xr><!--Fig.~{\ref{fig:Ursula1}}-->.
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= [[Applications of SANS in nanoscience]] =
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= [[The neutron scattering cross section from nano-sized particles]] =
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= [[Useful model-free approximations in SANS]] =
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= [[Small-angle scattering instruments]] =
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