Selected advances in small‐angle scattering and applications they serve in manufacturing, energy and climate change

Innovations in small‐angle X‐ray and neutron scattering (SAXS and SANS) at major X‐ray and neutron facilities offer new characterization tools for researching materials phenomena relevant to advanced applications. For SAXS, the new generation of diffraction‐limited storage rings, incorporating multi‐bend achromat concepts, dramatically decrease electron beam emittance and significantly increase X‐ray brilliance over previous third‐generation sources. This results in intense X‐ray incident beams that are more compact in the horizontal plane, allowing significantly improved spatial resolution, better time resolution, and a new era for coherent‐beam SAXS methods such as X‐ray photon correlation spectroscopy. Elsewhere, X‐ray free‐electron laser sources provide extremely bright, fully coherent, X‐ray pulses of