What is Synchrotron Radiation & What is it Good for?

Most of the companies I work with have conventional x-ray diffraction capabilities in-house.

Conventional x-ray sources are found in virtually every materials, pharmaceutical and chemistry laboratory in the world. So, the obvious question becomes: why bother with the expense of using a synchrotron source like the Advanced Photon Source (used by SynchXray, LLC.)?

1) The intensity of x-rays at a synchrotron source is millions of times stronger than conventional laboratory sources, allowing data collection in a shorter period of time and with higher precision. Additionally, synchrotron sources feature state-of-the-art detectors that, when coupled with the high-intensity of x-rays available at the source, increase the signal-to-noise (or, the ability to see a diffraction peak) significantly. If you are searching for a small weight fraction of “Compound A” in a pharmaceutical, you are far more likely to see it when using a synchrotron source.

2) Synchrotron x-ray beams are highly collimated, meaning the x-rays that emerge from the source are nearly parallel (as opposed to conventional laboratory x-ray generators, from which the x-rays diverge from the source in a large angular spread). This high degree of collimation means that very small angular differences between diffraction peaks are more easily resolved using a synchrotron source, which, in turn, means that it’s easier to distinguish “Compound A” from “Compound B,”  or polymorphs of a given compound.

3) Only limited sets of x-ray energies are available from a conventional in-house laboratory source. Synchrotron x-ray sources, on the other hand, allow you to select x-rays over a wider range of energies. There are many technical reasons why this “tunability” is advantageous.  For example, we commonly use high-energy x-rays in the range of 30-125 keV so that the entire bulk of the sample is probed with minimum absorption.