By: Mike Aubrey
After a long 6 months we’ve finally got our new bench top powder diffractometer installed! Our Rigaku Miniflex includes a Cu-K$\alpha$ source, 8-slot sample changer, and a HyPix-400 MF 2D detector. We’ve also been testing the air-free sample puck with a Be window. While none of our samples to date are extremely air or moisture sensitive, we have been able to obtain two hour scans without any noticeable signs of degradation.
Using disposable glass cover slides as the base plate and adding a thin layer of grease to restrain our loose powder samples we can get good signal to noise for our samples with a low background contribution. Using only a very small amount of sample at the center of of the circular sample plate we can still identify all of the major peaks relatively easily and the background can still be subtracted out with minimal issues. The scans shown below took about 30 minutes. We routinely collect initials scans of newly synthesized materials in 5 minutes or less.