Using Line Scan to Minimise Radiation Damage

In a typical oscillation experiment, a certain volume of the crystal is exposed to X-rays during the entire duration of the experiment. However radiation sensitive samples may not tolerate the dose required to collect an entire dataset and the crystal may decay over time. Attempts to reduce the intensity of the X-rays so that complete diffraction data are obtained is at the cost of higher resolution data.

Line scan is an effective tool to manage the data collection along a specified axis on the crystal. The advantage of this method is to spread the X-ray dose over a larger crystal volume by collecting diffraction images at multiple positions along a crystal.